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Other documents in English
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Fifty years after the foundation of the Fourth International - What perspectives for internationalist revolutionaries today? Pamphlet published by the ICU
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winter 1988
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السابق
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التالي
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The Third World Proletariat, integral part of the world proletariat.
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Is the Third World proletariat - the new battalions of capital's reserve army - as marginal and apolitical as it is described?
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Certainly neither more nor less than the English working class described by Engels in 1843 - the very same working class which
inspired Marx to write Capital and which he saw as the gravedigger of the bourgeoisie. Today, while under the present economic
crisis imperialism manages only to survive without solving any of its fundamental contradictions, this worldwide urbanisation of
the poor tends to take on a much more explosive character. The moral, political and cultural gap is not that wide between
proletarians living in British inner-cities like Toxteth and Tottenham, in American ghettos like the Bronx and Watts and those
in the poor districts of Karachi, Dacca, Mexico and Kingston. If only because partly at least they are the same people.
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After working in a Ford factory in Britain for ten or 15 years, a Pakistani worker going home to his relatives is bound not to
recognise his former village. Just as many British workers would fail to recognise the place where they were born, no more would
a Jamaican or Puerto-Rican worker who, going back to his native country, discovers buildings where there used to be cultivated
fields, not to mention all the shanty towns mushrooming along the roads.
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When leaving London for Kingston or Los Angeles for Mexico, you may find more slums, less homes with electricity or drains, but
you will find the same outlook and state of mind in all proletarian districts in the world. The same as in the shanty-towns of
Santiago de Chile or Buenos Aires where mud is everywhere but where people manage to watch television using a bit of dodgy
wiring when their electricity is cut off through lack of money. The same as in the black ghettoes of Los Angeles and Chicago, as
in Washington where dustbins have to be piled up onto the roofs of houses because the local authorities cannot afford to pay for
adequate dustbin collections and fear the proliferation of rats!
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Even the cultural gap is not what it used to be. Not only because portable radios and televisions have invaded the poorest
districts much quicker than proper sewerage and hygiene. It is not unusual for a worker who came directly from his village in
Nigeria to Britain, to go home to find that his old village has disappeared. And when he does manage to find the inhabitants of
his old village, it is more often than not in a shanty town around one of the larger centres. In these shanty towns one learns
more in a year than in the old village in a whole lifetime, if only because of the mixture of dozens of different nationalities
- people from Burkina-Faso, Ghana, Cameroun, Benin, etc., who came there looking for a job, not to mention the tens of thousands
of Europeans who are more numerous than they were in colonial times but remain closely sheltered in the rich white areas even
more than the white South Africans do.
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The practical social consequences of apartheid are not a monopoly of South African towns. Social apartheid, the class divisions
in society, is to be found in all the large cities worldwide, in the poor countries as well as in the rich.
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When, in the last century Marx analysed in Capital the in-built contradictions of capitalism, it was still at that time an
audacious theoretical anticipation. But as early as World War I, these contradictions became an integral part of reality. Since
that time Marx has been vindicated in the most tragic way. But at every stage the defeat of the proletariat has allowed the
capitalist system a further respite.
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Today the tremendous technological advances made in industrial production, urbanisation, communication and transport, have
turned the planet into a very small world while at the same time its population has grown enormously. Marx's prognoses are more
than ever tangible physical realities.
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السابق
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التالي
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أعلى الصفحة
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