Class struggles.

The 19^th century saw the abolition of the slave trade and, progressively, of slavery and serfdom. It also saw the rapid development of machines and the rise of the industrial entrepreneur. These two processes changed the nature of class struggles. Previously labour had been in bondage, and the opposition had been between the land owning aristocracy and the burghal artisans and merchants. Quite suddenly labour was freed and mechanisation was replacing craftsmanship. The opposition was no longer between the rural raw materials and their urban transformations, it was between the coalition of property and the propertyless, between capital and labour. At the start, the struggle was one sided, but labour organised and slowly bettered its condition. Soon seen as a threat to property, these labour movements were repressed. Free labour fought back, and the violence escalated as the military backed the police. By the turn of the century the working class was classified as dangerous and was treated accordingly. So organisations went underground and armed themselves. Robbery and murder became political acts. Then a first war, followed by a second wider one, put everyone in uniform.

Society had become bipolar, property and its mercenaries were face to face with labour, without intermediaries. It was an accident of history, a consequence of the new forms of production. Armies, however, had kept the three-rank system. Officers were born gentlemen, but corporals and sergeants were promoted on merit. Armies still had a social ladder and a middle-rank between command and execution. They had avoided the direct confrontation of high and low, with the buffers of NCOs. The total wars that engulfed first Europe then most of the Northern hemisphere had a levelling effect. Valour and virtue took precedence over wealth and lineage. Total war concentrated power, both political and economic, in the hands of governments and of their officials. After 1945 the fighting and, to a lesser degree, the production of weapons dropped in intensity. Armies demobilised but a new middleclass had been created by the turmoil. Nurses, teachers, liberal professions, engineers, government employees, the armed and security forces had run the country in war and would continue in “peace”. For the next two decades middle became the dominant ideology.

During the 1960s the middle was attacked on both sides. Civil rights and national liberation fronts (women and gays) contested the white man’s rule, and voices were raised against leviathan governments. Slowly pressured by developing nations and state privatisations, the middle-class has lost its dominant role, and its model of social mobility no longer applies. The Dream has become a déclassé nightmare. Society is sliding back to where it was a hundred years ago. But this time the face off between property and propertyless is on a global scale. Another middleclass revival through mass conscription and a war of nations is unimaginable, because of technology and America’s preponderant military power. So what will the growing violence of class struggles lead to this time? Is there some other way to reconstruct the buffer zone between capital and labour, and get the trickle of social mobility going again, or is this the last showdown, the final struggle, the synthesis of a contradiction, with liberty, equality, fraternity, and the pursuit of happiness for all humanity?

Property is possession, control and power. It owns and decides the production of goods, services and ideas, and has military might to protect it. It can choose, like Septimius Severus, to enrich the army and ignore the rest. It can, like Constantine the Great, adopt a popular movement, empty it of its social content, and use it as a totalitarian ideology. (Both have been imitated countless times). In the past, property has been destroyed and has changed hands. But after wars, conquest and financial collapses it has always rebuilt its dominion. A century and a half ago, a few dreamers claimed that property was the inheritance of labour, arguing that labour made property productive and that this was the basis of value. It seems that their logic is shared by an ever growing world community, who have nothing to lose but their debts.