The importance of being alienated (and organized).

• Author: Eytchison, Patrick
• Position: Thinking Politically

Orthodox Marxism's claim that the worker is the fundamental agent of change has received telling criticism in recent years. Not only has the modern worker as a class failed to live up to Marxist expectations but modern historical research demonstrates that pre-modern rebellions were generally led by merchants or by disaffected scholars.[1] This was true even of the largest peasant uprisings and is not difficult to understand. While those at the base of the system of production may suffer most and feel the most discontent, their very position in society robs them of the informational and organizing tools necessary to put that discontent into effective action. Merchants and intellectuals, on the other hand, by the nature of their place in society, possessed precisely the skills and knowledge needed for social change. With the modern era, merchants ceased to be a revolutionary class, but the class of scholars (intellectuals) was greatly enlarged. Marxism has been primarily a movement of intellectuals.

Voting and the regulation of modern intellectuals

Because intellectuals carry the potential for "disruption," class societies always maintain as a part of their general system of regulation one or more subsystems for the control and regulation of intellectuals. In imperial China, all intellectuals who were not religious intellectuals (another system of regulation) were meshed in a complex net of study, civil service examinations, ranking, and government service. As Kung-Chuan Hsiao has documented, Chinese intellectuals who joined with disaffected peasant groups were almost always intellectuals who had become alienated from the civil service system or, in some cases, orthodox religion.[2]

As Michael Parenti has convincingly argued, elections in modern democracies function primarily as a means for transforming radical or alienated dissent into manageable dialogue within a system of exploitation; dialogue which, by the nature of the transformation, works ultimately to reinforce rather than change the status quo. In Parenti's words, "an election is more a surrender than an assertion of popular power."[2] This does not mean that popular suffrage was not gained without struggle, but simply that all struggles for inclusion end ultimately in co-optation.

Given the obvious divorce between ballot participation and significant change, workers in recent years have more and more opted not to participate. US voter participation in the general election in 1960...