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The Working Class in the Future of the Third World

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BatesRobert H., Unions, Parties, and Political Development: A Study of Mineworkers in Zambia. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1971, 291 pp., $12.50.
CleggIan, Workers' Self-Management in Algeria. London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1971, 249 pp., £3.25; New York, Monthly Review Press, 1972, $8.95 ($2.95 paper).
ZeitlinMaurice, Revolutionary Politics and the Cuban Working Class, Expanded Edition. New York, Evanston, and London, Harper and Row, 1970. (First published by Princeton University Press, 1967.) 307 pp., $1.95 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Richard Sandbrook
Richard Sandbrook
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto.
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Extract

The historical role of the working class has recently been subject to reassessment. Frequently repudiated are the Marxist views that the proletariat constitutes either, as Marx's and Engels' classic scheme would have it, the revolutionary social force in capitalist societies, or, as Lenin believed, the pre-eminent element in a revolutionary alliance with the poorest strata of the peasantry, or, finally, as Mao holds, the leadership cadres needed to mobilize the downtrodden peasant masses into conscious, revolutionary action. Consider, for instance, the meager role attributed to the working class in Barrington Moore's brilliant effort, in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, to delineate three historical routes to modernity.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 25 , Issue 3 , April 1973 , pp. 448 - 478
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1973

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References

1 Boston 1966.

2 New York 1969.

3 Fanon, , The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth 1963), 86 and 101.Google Scholar

4 Kerr, Clark, Dunlop, John T., Harbison, Frederick H., and Myers, Charles H., Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth, 2nd ed. (New York 1964), 187.Google Scholar

5 Ibid., 190.

6 Ibid., 190.

7 For an interesting analysis of the aims of “target workers” in one country, see Elkan, Walter, Migrants and Proletarians: Urban Labour in the Economic Development of Uganda (London 1960), 131–32.Google Scholar

8 Touraine, Alaine and Pécaut, Daniel, “Working-Class Consciousness and Economic Development in Latin America,” Studies in Comparative International Development, in, No. 4 (1967–1968), 82.Google Scholar

9 Lenin, V. I., What is to be Done? (New York 1929), 33.Google Scholar

10 See Landsberger, Henry, “The Labor Elite: Is it Revolutionary?” in Lipset, Seymour M. and Solari, Aldo, eds., Elites in Latin America (New York 1967), 290–91Google Scholar; and Sandbrook, Richard, “The State and the Development of Trade Unionism,” in Hyden, Goran, Jackson, Robert and Okumu, John, eds., Development Administration (Nairobi 1970), 252–95.Google Scholar

11 Lenin, (fn. 9), 32.Google Scholar

12 Epstein, A. L., Politics in an Urban African Community (Manchester 1958), 28–31.Google Scholar

13 International Labour Office, “Report to the Government of Zambia on Incomes, Wages, and Prices in Zambia: Policy and Machinery” (Lusaka 1969), 9.Google Scholar Note that 1 Kwacha = $1.40.

14 Robert Molteno, “Independent Zambia: Achievements and Prospects,” in William Tordoff, ed., Government and Politics in Zambia (forthcoming).

15 Antonio Gramsci, the prominent Italian Marxist, maintained, for instance, that the factory council was “the model of the proletarian state,” since this institution allowed the proletariat “to educate itself, gather experience and acquire a responsible awareness of the duties incumbent upon classes that hold power of state.” Quoted in Merrington, John, “Theory and Practice in Gramsci's Marxism,” The Socialist Register, 1968 (London 1968), 158–59.Google Scholar

16 These estimates are based on David Porter's careful sifting of the available statistics. See “Workers' Self-Management: Algeria's Experiment in Radical Democracy,” paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Los Angeles, October 16–19, 1968, p. 1.

17 Bourdieu, Pierre, Darbel, A., and others, Travail et travailleurs en Algérie (Paris 1963).Google Scholar

18 Neither Clegg, pp. 85–93, nor Porter, (fn. 16), 19–21Google Scholar, accept the argument that self-management was responsible for Algeria's economic woes. Both writers agree that the economic failures of the self-managed sector were as much a result of bureaucratic inefficiency and sabotage as of anything else.

19 Zeiilin acknowledges this as being the case, as do other writers. See, for example, Ruiz, Ramon Eduardo, Cuba: The Making of a Revolution (New York 1968), 14.Google Scholar

20 Zeidin, , “Cuba-Revolution Without a Blueprint,” Trans-Action, VI (April 1969), 41.Google Scholar

21 Many writers have denied that the Communists represented a radical force during the Batista era. See, for example, Blackburn's, Robin excellent “Prologue to the Cuban Revolution,” New Left Review, No. 21 (October 1963), 87.Google Scholar

22 This is a point made by Nun, José in “Cuban Workers and tlie Revolution,” Trans-Action, VI (November 1968), 57.Google Scholar

23 Quoted in O'Connor, James, The Origins of Socialism in Cuba (Stanford 1970), 195.Google Scholar

24 Mesa-Lago, Carmelo, The Labor Sector and Socialist Distribution in Cuba (New York 1968), 182.Google Scholar

25 See, for example, Dumont, René, Cuba: est-il socialiste? (Paris 1970).Google Scholar The term state-class is not used by Dumont.

26 See Wolpe, H., “Some Problems Concerning Revolutionary Consciousness,” The Socialist Register, 1970 (London 1970), 254–55.Google Scholar

27 Iliffe, John, “A History of the Dockworkers of Dar es Salaam,” Tanzania Notes and Records, No. 71 (1970), 120.Google Scholar See also Thompson, E. D., The Mailing of the English Working Class (London 1964), 194.Google Scholar

28 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Algerians, trans, by Ross, Alan C. M. (Boston 1962), 64.Google Scholar

29 Lenin, (fn. 9), 32–33, 77–78.Google Scholar

30 Robert Molteno, “Cleavage and Conflict in Zambian Politics: A Study in Sec tionalism,” in Tordoff (fn. 14).

31 For an excellent comparative analysis of the likelihood that the marginal unemployed or underemployed sub-proletariat will participate in political violence, see Nelson, Joan M., Migrants, Urban Poverty and Instability in Developing Nations, Harvard University, Center for International Affairs, Occasional Paper No. 22 (September 1969).Google Scholar