At a high level of abstraction, the current period of globalization is defined by a trilogy of ideal-typical economies: super-industrial (coastal East Asia), financial/tertiary (North Atlantic), and hyper-urbanizing/extractive (West Africa). “Jobless growth” is incipient in the first, chronic in the second, and virtually absolute in the third. We might add a fourth ideal-type of disintegrating societies, caught in a vice of war and climate change, whose chief trend is the export of refugees and migrant labor. In any event, we can no longer rely on a single paradigmatic society or class to model the critical vectors of historical development. Imprudent coronations of abstractions like “the multitude” as historical subjects simply dramatize a poverty of empirical research. Contemporary Marxism must be able to scan the future from the simultaneous perspectives of Shenzhen, Los Angeles, and Lagos if it wants to solve the puzzle of how heterodox social categories might be fitted together in a single resistance to capitalism.

Even the most preliminary tasks are daunting. A new theory of revolution, to begin with, begs benchmarks in the old, starting with clarification of “proletarian agency” in classical socialist thought. In the first instance, of course, self-consciousness of agency preceded theory. The faith that “labor will inherit the earth” and that “the International will be the human race” did not rest on doctrine but arose volcanically from struggles for bread and dignity. Workers’ belief in their collective power to effect radical change, whose deep roots were located in the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, was amply ratified by the fears and nightmares of the Victorian bourgeoisie. (Although this is an obvious fact, not a small number of Marx’s critics have charged at one time or another that revolutionary agency was nothing more than a metaphysical invention, a Hegelian hobgoblin, foisted upon working masses whose actions were actually dictated by simple utilitarian calculation.)

But such a reconstruction from fragmentary sources, no matter how exegetically rigorous, should not be construed as the “true Marx.”

The missing volume, in other words, would presumably have adumbrated a theory of proletarian agency as an integral aspect of this self-making of labor as antagonist of capital

Such an enumeration of capacities might be amended or extended in various ways, but Marx’s central premise remains: that the sum of these capacities acquired in struggle is a realistic potential for self-emancipation and revolution. The conditions which confer capacity, we should recall, can be either structural or conjunctural. The first arise from the proletariat’s position in the mode of production; for example the possibility, if nothing more, of organizing mass strikes that shut down production in entire cities, industries, and even nations. The second is limited to historical stages or episodes, and is ultimately transient: as, for example, the stubborn maintenance of informal control over the labor process by late-Victorian engineering workers and ship-builders which survived until the First World War and the adoption of new production methods. The conjunctural can also denote the intersection of unsynchronized histories, such as the persistence of absolutism in the middle period of industrialization, which led in Europe to the potent convergence of suffrage struggles and industrial conflict—not the case in North America.

It was left to Luxemburg, in her writing on primitive accumulation as an ongoing requirement of valorization

Meanwhile the mass craft occupations and the out-work economy continued to flourish alongside the factory system for most of the nineteenth century and into the next. The Great Exhibition of 1851, Raphael Samuel once pointed out, may have glorified the age of steam-powered machinery, but the sixteen acres of glass (300,000 panes) that clothed the Crystal Palace were blown by hand. Indeed, as factory production and imported grain displaced artisans and farm laborers, the “superabundance of labour … encouraged capitalists to engage in capital-saving rather than labour-saving investment”—a negative feedback loop that slowed the pace of mechanization while vastly expanding the ranks of sweated and casual labor. The development of the labor process under capital followed a logic of uneven and combined development even in the most advanced societies.

Certainly, Marx acknowledged a “historical and moral element” in the constitution of wages, as well as victories for the “political economy of the working class such as the ten-hour day.” Likewise, the level of “necessary needs,” as Michael Lebowitz rightly insists, is “the product of class struggle,” not a fixed physiological minimum; and, in turn, the qualitative growth of the “standard of necessity” helps drive the economic class struggle forward.109 But Marx believed that such gains and the new needs they created would be cyclically eroded by crises, whose tendency was to become more general and destructive over time.

But solidarity, as noted earlier, is not directly endowed by factory relations of production; equally, class consciousness, as David Montgromery reminds us, “is always a project.” Workers in new industries or plants are initially atomized: a competitive situation that capitalists attempt to prolong through favoritism, piecework wages, and gender/ethnic divisions of labor. In the cases, common in nineteenth-century iron works and shipyards, where bosses “contracted in”—that is to say, allowed groups of skilled workers to bid on jobs and hire their own laborers—craft autonomy included a managerial dimension, leading at the extreme to co-exploitation of laborers and the unskilled. The Hobbesian factory or mill, as sociologist Katherine Archibald memorably argued in Wartime Shipyard: A Study in Social Disunity (1947), might even be considered the default condition of industrial life.120 Accordingly, even the most elementary forms of solidarity must be consciously constructed, beginning with the informal work groups, defined by common tasks or skills, that are the nuclei out of which a plant society, or rather counter-society, is built.

A large plant was often a fractious congeries that recapitulated the ethnic and geographical rivalries of the larger society.

The national revolt began at the Pressed Steel (railroad) Car Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel in McKees Rocks, outside of Pittsburgh, where 5,000 workers from sixteen different national groups endured working conditions that would have appalled Czarist officials. According to the former coroner of Pittsburgh, “the Pressed Steel Car Company killed an average of one man a day at its works because of the speed-up system and the failure to protect machinery.” When the workers walked out in July 1909, the company’s president declared: “They’re dead to us. There are more than enough idle men in Pittsburgh to fill every vacancy.” The company immediately brought in armed strikebreakers, mounted state police, and the militia, panicking the small group of skilled American unionists involved in the strike. But, as Philip Foner explains in his history of the IWW, “a group of the foreign-born strikers … had experience in revolutionary and labor struggles in Europe. They realized early in the strike that only a vigorous, militant strategy would achieve victory.” They elected an “Unknown Committee” that synthesized the combined experience of the European veterans and kept the strike going despite mass arrests, a “Bloody Sunday” massacre, and evictions of strikers’ families. The company, which had dismissed the strikers as little more than ignorant “Hunkie” peasants, was actually fighting a sophisticated leadership of former Hungarian socialists, Italian anarchists, Swiss social democrats, blacklisted German metalworkers, and Russian revolutionaries. The Unknowns eventually affiliated the struggle with the IWW, which mounted a brilliant national solidarity campaign on the workers’ behalf, and in September the company capitulated.1

Simultaneous with the last New York struggle, an even larger tenants’ strike broke out in the tenement (conventillo) districts of Buenos Aires, and by October 1907 an estimated 10 percent of the city’s population (about 120,000 residents) was refusing to pay rent to their landlords. The largely immigrant Argentine working class was the fastest growing in the world at the turn of the century, and Buenos Aires, which doubled its population in the decade after 1895, was an overcrowded boomtown where rack-renting was profligate. The more energetic of the country’s two labor federations, the anarchist Federación Obrera Regional Argentina (FORA), had decided at its Sixth Congress in 1906 to encourage the formation of a tenant strike movement. The strikes a year later were largely unsuccessful in their immediate objectives, but, as James Baer emphasizes, were strategically important in mobilizing proletarian women and non-union workers for general strikes that were soon to follow.

A classical example, cited by Hilferding in his Finance Capital (1910), was the international proliferation of peak employers’ organizations in response to the new industrial unions of the early twentieth century. In the German case, the Free Trade Unions had “developed a technique of labor struggle known as ‘Einzelabschlachtung’—literally, ‘knocking them off singly.’ The organized workers did not tackle an industry on a broad front but plant by plant. While the workers of one plant were on strike, their fellow-workers in other plants of the same industry would continue work and provide funds for the strikers.” Initially this was a great success, and “it soon became apparent that organized labor could be fought only by an organization of employers which corresponded in scale and financial resources to the unions.” The result was the formation of two national employers’ organizations, one for heavy industry and textiles, and the other for light industries, which emulated the research and coordinating functions of the central union leagues, and, like the unions, provided mutual aid and financial support during strikes and lockouts. As Carl Schorske observed, “unionization [by 1914] had produced its counterpart—a powerful enemy, armed with equal or superior weapons.”

Thus, in the case of Los Angeles—and in fact all the cities of the Pacific littoral from Seattle to Valparaiso to Yokohama—the ultimate battleground against the open shop was the harbor

The workers’ movement can and must confront the power of capital in every aspect of social life, organizing resistance on the terrains of the economic, the political, the urban, the social-reproductive, and the associational. It is the fusion or synthesis of these struggles, rather than their simple addition, which invests the proletariat with hegemonic consciousness.

Marx and Engels, for example, clearly believed that mass socialist consciousness would be a dialectical alloy of the economic and the political; of epic battles over rights as well as over wages and working hours; of bitter local fights and great international causes. Since the formation of the Communist League in 1847, they had argued that wage-labor constituted the only serious social force able to represent and enact a consistently democratic program of suffrage and rights, and thus provide the hegemonic glue to bind together a broad coalition of workers, poor peasants, national minorities, and radicalized strata of the middle class. While the mind of the liberal petty bourgeoisie easily amputated political rights from economic grievances, workers’ lives refuted any categorical distinction between oppression and exploitation. The “growing over” of political into economic democracy, and of economic class struggle into the question of state power—the process that Marx characterized as “permanent revolution” in the contexts of 1848 and Chartism—was a recurrent motif in all the great European social crises from 1848 to 1948.

The same pattern of “agglomerated villages” (actually large towns in many cases) characterized the latifundian societies of Andalusia and Apulia, both bastions of anarcho-syndicalism.

There is a legend about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly. Proletarian subjectivity does not evolve by incremental steps but requires non-linear leaps, especially moral self-recognition through solidarity with the struggle of a distant people, even when this contradicts short-term self-interest, as in the famous cases of Lancashire cotton workers’ enthusiasm for Lincoln and later for Gandhi. Socialism, in other words, requires non-utilitarian actors, whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual. Marx rightly scourged romantic humanism in the abstract, but his personal pantheon—Prometheus and Spartacus, Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare—affirmed a heroic vision of human possibility that no longer seems to have any purchase in our fallen world.