For Marx, the class struggle is not about individuals, who can be mechanically placed in this box or that box, but a continual struggle between the boxes themselves, the personnel within each box being relatively fixed, in aggregate, at any one time, but is itself subject to flux. To understand the class struggle, we do not need to be able to say this individual is a proletarian and this individual is a capitalist, because, for one thing, these definitions are never absolute as phenomenal forms. It is only necessary to be able to say there exists, say, capital, and those that own capital, in aggregate, come into an antagonistic relation with those, on aggregate, who do not own capital, and who must perform wage labour. It is then only necessary to recognise that, in society, there is an aggregate mass of people who represent this condition to one degree of purity or another, of owning capital, and only owning capital, i.e., as Marx puts it in The Grundrisse capital is not labour. Similarly, it is only necessary to know that there is an aggregate mass of people who represent this condition of not owning capital, again to varying degrees of purity.
If it were ever the case that these aggregate masses, in these different boxes, were 100% pure personifications of a given form of property, then social science would have an easier task in identifying not just how these aggregate social masses would act, but of how each individual would act. Forms of property are material conditions that are objectively determined. The social classes, as aggregates, that arise on the basis of these forms of property, are also, thereby, objectively determined, in so far as they represent a 100% pure manifestation of those forms of property, but they never are 100% pure, because the individuals that comprise these aggregate masses are never themselves 100% pure representatives of one form of property exclusively. We can say, therefore, that this box, or aggregate mass will tend to act in this way, but we can never say that this individual will act, or tend to act, in this way or another. For that, individual psychological analysis is required. The more homogeneous each box, i.e. the more the individuals comprising each box actually do only own their labour-power, or capital, the more each box will tend to act in the way that box would be expected to act, as determined by the objective interests of that particular form of property.
That is why, of course, Lenin was right to note that, in terms of identifying the way forward, it was the industrial proletariat, and not the peasantry, that had to be looked to. It was the industrial proletariat that was most clearly the representative of “not capital” that was most clearly divorced from any ownership of capital, compared to, for example, the small peasants and handicraft producers, who, whilst depending upon their labour-power, also owned means of production, and small scale capital.
But, even where the boxes are more or less homogeneous, in terms of the individuals relationship to different forms of property, they may be extremely heterogeneous in terms of those other social groups, and the individuals association with them. Those other social groups tend to divide society vertically, whereas social class and status divides it horizontally. For example, society is divided into people who are men and women, in each of the social classes. This creates a series of cross-cutting cleavages, forming the kind of matrix that Engels describes in his Letter to Bloch, so that the division of society along purely class lines is never absolute. Indeed, in societies where social classes are far from being homogeneous, for example where the peasant producer, and petty-bourgeois may be preponderant, it may well be that these vertical cleavages play the most significant role. The role of religious division, in the Middle-East, or in Northern Ireland, is an obvious example.
The more developed the mode of production, the sharper the class antagonism becomes, and so the less importance the vertical cleavages exert. Indeed, the expression of the vertical cleavages and their resolution often, then, becomes inseparable from the resolution of the class struggle itself. The granting of privileges to a particular religious or other group is often related to economic development. For example, Protestant workers in Northern Ireland, did not require huge privileges to keep them separated from Catholic workers, thereby frustrating any joint class struggle. Male workers, in the past, did not require huge privileges over women workers to keep them divided etc. Economic development, in Ireland, has largely undermined the Protestant Ascendancy, and the privileges that went with it. The demand for labour, in the post-war period, drew in large numbers of women workers, who, over the years, have gained in strength, so as to be able to challenge the subordinate position they faced relative to men in society, even though that struggle is not yet won.
These vertical divisions may be consistent with previous modes of production, and capital itself may use them opportunistically, in the short-term, to its advantage, but, overall, they are detrimental to capital accumulation. When capital needs additional labour, so as to extend the social working-day, and, thereby, increase absolute surplus value, it does not want to be impeded in that by sexist male workers opposing the employment of women, nor does it want to be impeded in employing immigrant workers by restrictions on free movement, by racist workers demanding immigration controls, or demands like “British Jobs for British Workers”. It may, opportunistically, seek to use such divisions by paying lower wages to women or foreign workers, who find themselves in a weaker position, but it is usually the plethora of small capitalists for whom these kinds of penny-pinching means of obtaining profits are significant, not the dominant large-scale capitals.
If we look at the increasing role of the British-Indian bourgeoisie in the Tory Party, it is not at all difficult to ascertain why they supported Brexit. It is not to stop immigration, but to stop EU immigration, the better to replace it with large-scale immigration of cheap labour from the Indian sub-Continent, labour required by that British-Indian bourgeoisie of small business owners, labour that will not have the protections of immigrant EU workers.
But, also, if we look at those countries that sought to industrialise rapidly, where they have faced these kinds of vertical cleavages, they have also invariably had to resort to some form of Bonapartist regime, which acts to contain, usually brutally, these cleavages, in order that the process of capital accumulation can proceed. Indeed, as Marx identifies, that is effectively what British colonialism did in India. In societies riven with these vertical cleavages, it is hard for capital accumulation and economic development to proceed, but without the capital accumulation and economic development it is difficult for the horizontal cleavages, along class and status lines. to become the dominant and determining factor. Much as Marxists abhor the brutality of colonialism, and of the role of the Bonapartists, therefore, they also recognise that they often play a progressive historical role, in breaking this impasse.
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