universal and working class consciousness…//On the Birth of Global Green Consciousness
We have been critical of marxism but wary of critiquing its key focus on the working class: it is a brilliant strategic thought one challenges to one’s theoretical peril. And yet we have also considered a critical stance, given as noted, its failure to really emerge as expected. The working class has never quite been revolutionary, not surprising since it is an abstraction not a person and has no real ‘essence’ as do people, and the idea reintroduces class domination upside down just as a socialist end point wishes to abolish class.
We have considered instead, or rather in addition, the idea of the universal class: we don’t have to hypostatize the universal class: it includes all classes, all subsets of that universal class, and singlet sets, i.e. individuals each as class unto himself: all this forms a unity as the ‘universal class’. Since the working class is perhaps the largest class subset of universal class its promotion makes logical sense as a majoritarian concept. But a revolutionary (or evolutionary) framework would do well to consider its basis as the universal class (however keeping multiple irons in the fire, multitasking both or multiple approaches) since it can thus appeal to all those who are logically excluded from social action (in a strange blunder in the original concept, how many volunteers and hot heads from the other classes has revolution lost because they weren’t cliche working class types and recoiled as unwelcome? a lot)
This beyond confusing jargon is how we take ordinary party politics: no issues of class arise, a member is anyone who joins according to an allegiance on principle. Combinations of these ideas is possible but a revolutionary class will be a polkadot assembly from multiple classes, the working class thus also possibly a focal point, Lenin was not working class. This points directly to the subset of greens, often upper middle class or bourgeois with green ideals and less aware of class economic issues. These variants find a place in the universal class on the spot: our tactic then is some kind of cojoined issue platform of multiple classes, e.g. socialist and green…obvious points we might have thought until we see how the yellow vests had to play just his issue and almost fumbled. We might find that while the working class is both majoritarian and the core of a synthesis in the universal class it could easily derail a larger social perspective in the name of its class interests.
In the final analysis Joyce’s Mr. Here Comes Everybody, Finn again, is mainly a member of the universal class and should come to the aide of the party of the first part, himself et al.
We may as well go ‘new age’ here and catalogue multiple types of consciousness in a universal consciousness (needs a little work, a sort of leftist yoga sutra, with the original self-consciousness of evolving homo sapiens as the model of that ‘universal’ consciousness…well done).
Historically, Marx’s transnational revolutionary worker class failed to materialize. Yet, the current stage of both the forces and relations of production have given rise to a Green consciousness that has idealistically critiqued the current global system and is ready to join hands across class and nation. Thus, if there is to be a 21st century ” revolutionary multitude” in the sense of Negri’s and Hardt’s famous culminating aspiration then that multitude will be Green, Globally connected, and Growing in both praxis and power.
Darwiniana 