For a Broad Notion of the Working Class and Against Factory-Workerism: A Response to Gary Levi

Joshua Lew McDermott responds to Gary Levi’s critique of their article of last year, arguing that Levi’s theories of class formation, class consciousness, and class power represent an over-simplistic view they term ‘factory-workerism.’

Why have the Italian proletarian parties always been weak from a revolutionary point of view? Why have they failed, when they should have passed from words to action? They did not know the situation in which they had to operate, they did not know the terrain on which they should have given battle. . . We do not know Italy. Worse still: we lack the proper instruments for knowing Italy as it really is. It is therefore almost impossible for us to make predictions, to orient ourselves, to establish lines of action which have some likelihood of being accurate.

-Antonio Gramsci, ‘What is to be Done?’

We should proceed from the actual conditions inside and outside the country, the province, county or district, and derive from them, as our guide to action, laws that are inherent in them and not imaginary, that is, we should find the internal relations of the events occurring around us. And in order to do that we must rely not on subjective imagination, not on momentary enthusiasm, not on lifeless books, but on facts that exist objectively; we must appropriate the material in detail and, guided by the general principles of Marxism-Leninism, draw correct conclusions from it.

-Mao Zedong, ‘Oppose Book Worship’

Introduction

When I saw the publication of comrade Gary Levi’s “Who are the Workers, and Why Does it Matter,” a response to my December 2023 Cosmonaut article “Two Myths about the Working Class,” I was pleasantly surprised. Levi’s response engages important central questions for Marxists today. Levi’s piece also rightly challenges the most vulgar and sectarian trends in contemporary Marxist thought, namely the strange rejection of service workers in definitions of the working class, a perspective most often pushed by sectarian arm-chair Stalinists who seem, for various reasons, to infect various online leftist spaces.¹

More importantly, Levi’s response gives me both the opportunity and direction to elaborate and develop my initial argument in that his response is indicative of the errors in many variants of contemporary Marxist thought, especially Marxist thought coming from the West, that inspired my initial piece.

Indeed, my initial piece was little more than a brief polemic seeking to summarize an important truth: many Marxists thinkers in the West today fail to account for the majority of the world’s workers (especially workers located in Africa and the Global South) in their stubborn assumptions about the nature of work and the struggle for socialism. That Levi responded with such a long and thorough response is encouraging, if not a little puzzling, and indicative of the stagnation of much Marxist thought today in its substance. Perhaps because my initial piece was so short, Levi’s response tended to put words in my mouth (assuming what I meant by “deindustrialization” was a decline in the volume of manufactured goods being produced, for instance, or assuming my definition of lumpen), and thus demands a proper response and fuller elaboration and empirical demonstration of my argument. 

In the end, this type of fruitful debate is crucial in the development of the Marxist program today and is indicative of the positive platform Cosmonaut is providing for substantive debate. 

A few brief methodological and conceptual notes are also important before my argument begins in earnest: in the instances in my response where I draw upon foundational Marxist thinkers I do not, crucially, point out Levi’s deviation from classic Marxist theory to imply that deviation from some unquestionable precepts automatically invalidate their argument.  Such a line of thinking is indicative of a dogmatic biblicism that is detrimental to rigorous thought, and breeds sectarianism (a line of thinking which Levi, unfortunately, occasionally engages in). Instead, I note comrade Levi’s deviation from classic Marxism, or as I prefer to refer to it, dialectical materialism, because incorrect theory and methodology lead to incorrect conclusions and, I believe, the methodology of dialectical materialism is the correct methodology we must employ if we are to accomplish the task of properly understanding of our current situation and effective strategizing the revolutionary working-class movement. In other words, when I quote Marx or other thinkers, it is not to engage in appeals to authority, but to demonstrate the correct methodology of revolutionary analysis and to counter Levi (and others’) confident assertions that specific readings of Marx (or Lenin, etc.) are the only correct readings and amount to gospel. In fact, many of Levi’s understandings of key Marxist concepts are verifiably incorrect or, at least, deeply flawed (as in his definition of lumpen, for instance). 

Also crucial is one area where Levi was correct in his criticism of my piece: his pointing out that my usage of terms, especially the term informal, often left theoretical and conceptual clarity to be desired. I agree, and Levi’s piece has offered me the opportunity to elaborate and clarify. For instance, in this essay I adopt the term irregular labor (and irregular workers)² to refer to the collective plethora of non-regular labor relations that exist in the contemporary capitalist system. This includes unpaid, unwaged, and informal work, all of which are intertwined in complex ways that cannot be adequately disaggregated without reference to specific concrete cases. 

Irregular and unemployed workers compose the relative surplus population and its industrial reserve army (i.e. the reserve army of labor). Crucially, it is key to note that I consider the relative surplus population and the industrial reserve army of labor as part of, not exterior to, the working class, and thus the socialist struggle. This is perhaps the central and defining difference between Levi’s conception of the working class and my own. 

On this note, I also want to emphasize, contrary to much of the generalized simplistic and underdeveloped notions of these concepts that many Marxists adhere to,³ members of the surplus population/reserve army of labor are intimately tied to various aspects of the capital accumulation process and the reproduction of the capitalist system, including even in processes of value production and the realization of profit. Their significance to an analysis of capitalism and to the class struggle, then, cannot be reduced to their driving down the wages of the actively-employed: they play a much larger role than that. 

In this essay, I will address the shortcomings of comrade Levi’s implicit theories of class formation, class consciousness, and class power which, I will argue, are overly simplistic and ontologically shallow, and deviate from the dialectic and empirically responsive nature of classic Marxist thought and practice. I will also point out serious empirical errors in comrade Levi’s notions of deindustrialization and the nature of the global working class and capitalism today. 

It is worth reiterating: my critique of Levi’s article here is not only relevant to Levi’s thought, as I believe it is indicative of popular trends of Eurocentrism and factory-workerism in contemporary Marxism. Factory-workerism, specifically, refers to the fetishization of the factory as the defining feature of capitalism, adherence to a vulgar Marxist notion of factory work equating to class consciousness, an emphasis on the trade union struggle over the political and other non-union struggles, and a simplistic view of working class and worker power wherein power is reduced primarily to certain strategic locations. I do not use the term, however, as a means of arguing we must abandon the trade union movement or the industrial proletariat, nor to say that the nature of capitalism is not to be found in its economic essence (the production and distribution of commodities in the process of capital accumulation). Rather, I use the term to decry an outdated and dogmatic stance that privileges industrial workers at the expense of other workers, excludes billions of workers from the category of the working class, undermining the global communist struggle through adherence to a puritanical definition of the proletariat. 

It is also important to note, however, that Levi’s skepticism and wariness of an abandonment of the foundational program of Marxism are warranted: since the 60s, New Left thought and the rise of what What Tom Brass refers to as “postmodern populism” has led to various ostensibly leftist schools of thought (and social movements writ large) abandoning class, materialism, and Marxism altogether in the name of recognizing, centering, and privileging cultural difference and maligned identity groups rather than class. This line of thinking is indicative in the almost totally ineffectual rise of anarchism and subaltern and various post-colonial and decolonial schools of thought which are, in practice, little more than petit bourgeois programs of reformism and for certain professional and academic individuals to achieve inclusion into privileged class positions. I can recognize that much of Levi’s article is, in fact, a defense against such post-Marxist, postmodern onslaughts, which Levi incorrectly assumes I am partaking in. 

In fact, my goal is the exact opposite of postmodern populism: my goal is to defend and strengthen Marxist analysis, thought, and the Marxist revolutionary program from the postmodernist academics and social movement professionals by meeting their challenges head-on and by demonstrating that Marxism is not, in fact, inapplicable to the postcolonial context nor is it inherently Eurocentric. 

I do not, therefore, charge “Eurocentrism” towards Levi and the lines of thinking he represents as a cheap appeal to identity politics or as a moral indictment. Instead, I charge Eurocentrism in the sense that there are real empirical and theoretical shortcomings in popular and Western Marxist thought which manifest as a failure to recognize the nature of the class struggle in Africa and other non-industrial Global South locales today, and which have equally failed to analyze the concrete situation of the class struggle in the deindustrializing Global North.  

The Inherent Reformism of Analytical Marxism’s PRA, Factory-Workerism, and Economism: Towards A Holistic, Dialectical Understanding of Working Class Power

My first contention is that much of the theoretical and practical shortcomings of the contemporary Marxist movement in the U.S. and the U.K., namely the tendencies of economism and factory-workerism, are actually traceable to the overall shift towards Analytical Marxism in the Anglo world since the 1980s. In many ways, Analytical Marxism emerged as an avenue for academics influenced by Marx to obtain professional and intellectual respectability and prestige in an age of hostility towards Marxism in the academy. This was done via a rejection of many of the hallmarks of Classical Marxist thought, including dialectical materialism itself, and, instead, the adoption of analytical philosophical assumptions, frameworks, and methodologies, including, for example, an emphasis on rational choice theory, straightforward notions of causation, and individualistic conceptions of society in their understandings of society, capitalism, and socialism. These philosophical assumptions extended also, crucially, to notions of worker power in the form of the Power Resources Approach (PRA). Levi displays these same tendencies, opting for simplistic, mechanistic, and atomized notions of the working class, power, and the development of class consciousness. 

Indeed, many US Marxists are themselves unaware of the major influence Analytical Marxism has had, and continues to have, on Marxist thought in the US, and thus perpetuate and uphold analytical approaches to class and social analysis which are inherently at odds with the dialectical materialism of Classical Marxism. They may even do so while simultaneously condemning the undialectical (and therefore non-Marxists) nature of Analytical Marxism. Levi is a case-in-point of this phenomenon. 

Levi starts his essay by implying that his approach to class theory is distinct from that of Erik Olin Wright.⁴ Levi critiques Wright’s theory because it “dissolve[s] the understanding of class as a relation to production into a generalized fine-grained analysis of ‘rights and powers people have with respect to productive resources and economic activities.’”⁵ Ironically, Levi’s conception of worker power and of class is itself emblematic of Wright’s Analytical Marxism, specifically the PRA. For instance, Levi sums up his central argument about worker power and strategy (who has it, who doesn’t) in the sentence: “ the social power of workers with regards to society as a whole will vary with regards to the character of their work and its centrality to the overall functioning of the economy.” This approach to worker power is identical to the PRA of Analytical Marxism for understanding worker power. 

Indeed, the PRA is one of the defining aspects of contemporary Wright-influenced Analytical Marxism, and arguably the animating framework in the contemporary professional trade union movement and labor movement scholarship today for understanding worker power. Despite its mechanistic understanding of worker power, entailing an “implicit transformation of class power as a relation into compartmentalized capacities of workers and workers’ organizations,”⁶ the PRA has been greatly influential and in-vogue among labor movement academics influenced by Analytical Marxism such as Chris Tilly, and professional trade unionists, such as Kim Moody.⁷ The PRA is also indicative of broader and older trends of workerism and economism that had been fundamentally challenged in the Marxist movement by Marx, Lenin, Mao, Cabral, Guevara, and virtually every other decisive Marxist practitioner and thinker in the Marxist legacy, especially those from the Global South.

Indeed, Levi ignores his own imperative that, as Marxists, “our goal should not be to understand class as a sociologist might, as a unit of pure analysis (as the saying goes, ‘as a bug under glass’), but as formations thrust into conflict by the very relations of production—and further, to understand these conflicts as ones in which socialists have a distinct side.”⁸ Levi’s approach, instead, offers an oversimplified, schematized, and flattened account of the complexity of the class struggle. 

Take, for example, Levi’s account of what he refers to as “social power.” In the essay, Levi makes little argument for and provides little evidence for his narrow concept of power, writing as if it is self-apparent that autoworkers and teamsters have more “social power” than Starbucks workers. For example, Levi states: “[It] is also simply a fact that these [Starbucks] workers have less social power than UPS workers, despite the fact that UPS workers did not engage in a heroic wave of organizing this last year.”

First, one would have to ask what Levi means by social power in this context. If Levi means structural power in the sense of being able to effectively disrupt production, circulation, or the capitalist system generally (I assume this is Levi’s meaning) then there are legitimate reasons to deny this claim. 

For example, Edward Webster has demonstrated that in South Africa, where a large irregular working class predominates and where (ironically, if we are subscribing to Levi’s view) the worker movements have been among the most radical and disruptive in recent decades, irregular and non-industrial workers have leveraged forms of power other than those located in strategic industrial/logistical industries to close roads, shut down cities, and turn off the accumulation process.⁹ I have witnessed the same power flexed by supposedly structurally-weak workers (if I can identify them as workers) throughout the West African context. 

To further counter Levi’s contention, we must only ask ourselves where the most effective anti-systemic struggles of the twenty-first century have been found: among the informal street vendors who ignited the Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia, in the irregular worker uprisings that have engulfed Africa (including among the market women of Liberia and the unemployed youth of Burkina Faso), in the enduring strength of the Naxalite peasants of West Bengal, and also in the nation-wide Indian mass strikes of recent years which have been comprised largely of irregular workers. In comparison to the uprisings of the irregular workers in the Global South in recent years, the significance of the labor movement in the US championed by the professional trade unionists and the labor movement academics who have pushed the PRA espoused by Levi has been minor indeed. 

Other thinkers, in line with Webster, have argued for the importance of recognizing other forms of power beyond just industrial structural power that the working class holds, from institutional to symbolic to associational.¹⁰ This is not to say that the industrial structural power Levi emphasizes is not important, but simply to say that it is not supreme, nor is worker power and revolutionary strategy so straightforward and simple. To argue otherwise is indicative of an economism and workerism which emphasizes only certain workers and labor unions, deemphasizes other aspects and opportunities for the class struggle (especially in the political sphere) and necessarily begets a program that Maoist J. Moufawad-Paul rightfully calls “neo-reformism” in that it does not automatically portend revolutionary change and tends, instead, towards incremental improvements for certain workers lucky enough to be in unions.¹¹

Levi’s economism is most explicit in his argument that the UAW strike against plant closures is inherently revolutionary. He states, “the recent UAW strike and its outcome has given at least a little vision of how a fighting labor movement really can answer the bosses — clawing back, for example, the right to strike over plant closings.” One could argue that protests against plant closures are themselves conservative, not forward-looking. The quote from the Communist Manifesto Levi uses in his piece to decry the conservative nature of peasants fighting against the development of capitalism is equally applicable to the UAW strikes Levi endorses as indicative of revolutionary progress. For reference: 

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant; these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.¹²

It is hard not to see how this passage squarely applies to the relatively privileged and shrinking unionized industrial class in the United States who do not seek to challenge capitalism, but to keep the privileges of belonging to the global labor aristocracy. There is a reason, for instance, that both Donald Trump and Joe Biden repeatedly portray themselves as the champions of the manufacturing sector, and it is not because they are pushing for the empowerment of the working class.

To return to my previous point: there is a growing body of experience and insights which have shown the ineffectual nature of the simplistic strategism indicative of Levi’s and the PRA view. Katy Fox-Hoddess, for instance, found that dock workers in Colombia who meet all the criteria of immense strategic and structural power actually have far less power than PRA thinkers would anticipate given other social and political factors overlooked by simple configurations of strategic worker power.¹³ Elsewhere, Martin Danyluk offers an insightful study on the failures of transit workers in Coco Solo, Panama, who are strategically placed to shut down the “choke point” where commodity chains flow through the Atlantic entrance of the Panama Canal. As Danyluk says, “a narrow focus on the leverage available to protesters by seizing a strategic position can obscure a host of other factors that influence the outcomes of such actions.” But, like Danyluk, if I may borrow their words, it is important to note that 

…my contention is not, emphatically, that blockades are ineffective. Rather, I seek to better understand the conditions that favour their success, the diverse contexts in which they are mobilised, and the value of going beyond workerist and insurrectionist accounts of supply chain disruption.¹⁴

Perhaps ironically, the example of the power of UPS drivers that Levi uses to defend his view that a traditionally-conceived industrial proletariat has outsized power is actually indicative of the shift towards a de-industrial consumer economy in the US, wherein circulation has become a site of worker struggle at least as (if not more) important than the site of production. It is among transit workers and warehouse workers, for instance, that much of the current labor movement strategizing in the US is focused. 

We must also point out, however, that at such points of strategic importance, precisely because they are small and infrequent, the ruling class and its police forces are likely to crush the worker movement swiftly and without mercy. Take for instance the specter of a rail worker strike in 2022: the Biden administration and Congress moved to stop such a strike before it could even begin. Such is a flaw of the PRA choke-point strategy: the capitalists and the capitalist state also know where their weaknesses lie and are not likely to let workers exploit them. Indeed, it is unlikely that workers in the major choke points of the US economy are likely to ever even reach the point of wild-cat strikes unless those workers are backed by the power of a general worker movement and a general milieu of class-consciousness. Such backing is borne not out of a limited notion of strategy and power but a general one that has risen out of a militant political, cultural, and generalized class struggle. In other words, the PRA puts the cart before the horse. 

What’s more, I would argue that a country-wide strike in the U.S. by Starbucks workers tomorrow would actually be more consequential than an autoworkers strike for a variety of reasons, not least of all the powerful symbolic challenge to US consumerism that such a strike would entail. This includes its potential to raise class consciousness among a wide swath of the US public who are themselves service workers, as well as the consequent disruption of daily life for many consumers, that a UAW strike is unlikely to produce. Even if one disagrees with this argument, we cannot, as Levi would have it, dismiss it a priori because it does not strike us as sufficiently Marxist or does not align with our preconceived notions of worker power based on productive or logistical structural power. 

Indeed, one cannot help but read Levi’s response as one of purity-test of adherence to preconceived and simplistic notions of who workers are, where class consciousness comes from, and how the revolution is supposed to happen. This is why Levi’s response (at least in the first half) is also indicative of a broader issue in the Marxist movement of today: that we are in a period of stagnation, a backwards looking book-worship unable or unwilling to do the necessary and hard work of analyzing and theorizing for the concrete conditions of our current moment. The Gramsci quote which opens this piece is also an accurate characterization of this backwards-looking, book-based Marxism of today. 

Levi’s account of power is exemplary of the PRA approach in that it reduces decisive worker power to strategic locations of a small number of workers, viewing the struggles of workers not actively employed in specific sectors as less consequential. In this approach, Levi and the PRA adherents undermine the dialectical Marxist project of recognizing the totality of the class struggle and of the generalized power of the working class in the many interconnected arenas of social life and production. Levi’s view especially overlooks the power and revolutionary potential of workers in both non-industrialized and non-regular jobs in the Global North and Global South. 

Marxism is a method and an evolving revolutionary program which must be applied through analysis of really-existing conditions. Just because the world is more complex than the industrial capitalism of Marx’s day, and it is, indeed, difficult to engage in the kind of empirical and exhaustive type of analysis that building a revolutionary movement calls for, this does not mean we should rest on our laurels of lazily applying the empirical insights from previous eras. It does not mean we can ignore the billions of workers who do not fit neatly into narrow theoretical categories. 

To reiterate: I am not saying that it necessarily follows that the expropriation of surplus value is not still a fundamental basis of our society: such is the bedrock of any Marxist/dialectical materialist analysis of capitalism. What I am saying is that it does not follow from this recognition that we ought to fear ruthlessly confronting and theorizing the nature of the exploitative global class system of today, utilizing the methodology put forth by Marx and extended by various revolutionaries since his time. I am saying that the complexity and totality of the class system and the productive forces of today mean that narrow, industrial definitions of the proletariat are incapable of challenging the capitalist system of the 21st century. 

I am also not denying that some industries are more important than others in certain respects, nor am I arguing that different industries should not be targeted in different strategic manners. But the idea that the broad worker struggle can win a revolution by prioritizing those workers who work in factories without a more complex, contextualized, and general analysis and strategic program is fatally flawed. We cannot and should not succumb to simplistic, mechanistic, and decontextualized notions of worker power. 

Misusing of Marx: The Racialized and Chauvinistic Usage of “Lumpenproletariat” 

In his short section on the lumpenproletariat, Levi implies I would consider mafia hitmen as working class. I never said such, and to do so would be absurd. 

More importantly for purposes of general significance, Levi is incorrect when he claims that Marx used the term lumpenproletariat to refer to urban poor who “are not working.” I have seen this usage of lumpen frequently from Marxists. In essence, this makes the lumpenproletariat synonymous with the reserve army of labor, a fact that offers no conceptual clarity and which is, if we refer to Marx, verifiably wrong. 

Like many concepts and words utilized by Marx, the lumpenproletariat was never systematically defined though one convincingly argue the most consistent usage of the term in Marx’s works refers to a cross-class characterization of criminal, anti-social, and reactionary social elements, as has been well explored by various thinkers including especially Sierra Leonean Marxist Ibrahim Abdullah in his analysis of the Sierra Leone Civil War and theorist Nicholas Thoburn.¹⁵ In other words, lumpen refers to a “particular mode of political composition,”¹⁶ not a class or a class segment. Take The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte for instance, which contains Marx’s most extensive application of the lumpenproletarian concept. In it, Marx defines lumpenproletariat clearly not in terms of the urban poor who cannot find work, but in terms of criminal and anti-social elements that exist across classes: 

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars.¹⁷ 

One is hard pressed to argue the owners of brothels are part of the working class. They can only be reasonably understood, instead, as small-scale employers, albeit within the illicit economy. Marx’s disdain for the lumpenproletariat also aligns roughly with his broader critiques of the anti-class-politics inherent in the Bohemian milieu of Europe at the time. Marx even defines Louis Bonaparte himself, as far from proletarian as one can imagine, as a “princely lumpen proletarian.” He continues elsewhere, “above all, Bonaparte knows how to pose as the Chief of the Society of December 10, as the representative of the lumpenproletariat to which he himself, his entourage, his government, and his army belong.”¹⁸ It is hard to argue that the bureaucrats of the Bonaparte government are “not working” or that they are a segment of the proletariat. 

In identifying anti-social and criminal elements of society, I actually find the concept of lumpen to be quite useful. For instance, the concept of the lumpenproletariat can help to illuminate the role of narco-capitalism and the drug trade in facilitating authoritarian neoliberal regimes and imperial control in Latin America. It is also useful in identifying the largely reactionary nature of various trends in the West towards vagabond lifestyles that include “dropping out,” indulging in hard drug use, etc. These lifestyles are indicative of contemporary anarchist and “crust-punk” subcultures. The pipeline between this new-age and antisocial cultural milieu (the modern variant of which emerged in earnest in the 1990s) to outright support for the Trump administration and wholesale subscription to reactionary conspiracy theories (such as the anti-vaccination movement and Q-Anon) is clear. 

What I decry is the usage of the term as a catchall for the (often) racialized urban poor and unemployed, utilized by Eurocentric and middle-class Marxists to write off a crucial segment of the proletariat as inherently reactionary or useless in the struggle. The problem with Levi’s definition of lumpenproletariat as synonymous with the “not working” poor is that it precisely upholds the chauvinistic and racialized legacies of the term. 

This problematic usage of the term is most explicitly perpetuated, it must be said, not by well-meaning comrades such as Levi, but by online dogmatists, themselves usually Stalinists or other Soviet LARPers, who serve little purpose other than to delegitimize Marxism on social media. This type of usage was also rampant in Germany’s SPD and has a long history among right-communists throughout Europe: we must be precise and mindful when using the term lumpen to not perpetuate such views. 

The Surplus Population/Reserve Army of Labor, Own-account Workers, and the Working Class

A central issue with Levi’s article is a failure to consistently define the working class. For example, in some instances Levi seems to imply a narrow definition for the working class, one that only includes workers directly employed by capitalists. As Levi states: “The reason non-industrial workers are workers is simple. They are employed by capitalists, and they are paid by the capitalists for only a portion of the total work they do, with the remainder of their labor being appropriated by the capitalists in the form of profit.” From this definition of Levi’s, one could logically conclude Levi does not view public sector workers as members of the working class. In other instances, such as in the section titled “Consciousness,” Levi uses the concept in an even narrower sense, namely as synonym for the industrial proletariat itself, as I will explore later. Yet, elsewhere in the essay, Levi opts for a broader definition of the concept, such as when he argues we ought to consider nonproductive workers and nonindustrial workers as members of the working class.

To cut through this inconsistency, we can again turn to the “Consciousness” section of the essay. Here, Levi gets to the central argument and impetus for his article: a need to “be wary of attempts (such as McDermott’s) to widen the definition of the working class to the poor and dispossessed more generally.” In other words, despite a lack of definitional clarity, we can assume that, overall, Levi is arguing for a definition of the working class as synonymous with active employment. In other words, he is arguing that irregular workers, especially own-account workers and the unemployed (i.e. those poor excluded from the waged employment relationship) are not members of the working class. 

But one does not have to be an employee to be a member of the working class. Levi’s attempt to exclude “the poor and dispossessed generally” from his definition of the working class is wrong precisely because it excludes members of the surplus population/industrial reserve army from its conception of the working class, a population Marx recognized explicitly as part of the working class. To quote Marx from Chapter 25 of Volume I of Capital: 

[wages are] therefore, not determined by the variations of the absolute number of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working-class is divided into active and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of the surplus-population, by the extent to which it is now absorbed, now set free. (emphasis added)

In other words, Marx viewed the reserve army (i.e. the unemployed, informal workers, irregular workers) as a part of the working class.¹⁹

Now, let us talk about own-account workers specifically for a moment. Own-account workers make up a huge portion of the world’s workers and, by extension, the global capitalist system’s relative surplus population. By own-account workers, I am referring to individuals without employees and without formal registration (i.e. in the informal economy) who survive via self-employment of various kinds (many through street vending).²⁰ In other words, I am not referring to licensed business entities or small business owners. Most of the world’s own-account workers, especially those in the informal economy, are forced to turn to petty survival activities to survive, not for extracting surplus value (i.e. not because they are or wanted to be small-business owners, as Levi argues). These are most equivalent to what Marx often referred to as “paupers,”²¹ not to petite bourgeois individuals, as Levi contends. 

To reiterate: the world’s impoverished, informal street vendors (I am not speaking about relatively stable, formal street vendors who can afford to rent stalls, to own equipment, to own large inventories, etc.) are not petty bourgeois precisely because they own no capital, have not chosen to become street vendors voluntarily, and have no goals or chance to expand their “businesses,” businesses which usually amount to a few articles of clothing, bars of soap, etc. stored in a box or container and bought on credit from a wholesaler. In other words, they are street vendors because they are forced to survive in conditions of extreme deprivation with no personal access to the labor market. In other words, a material analysis of the informal street vendors that comprise the bulk of the category the ILO refers to as “own-account workers,”²² proves they are not peasants nor part of the petty bourgeois. 

More damningly, to identify the hundreds of millions of struggling petty street vendors and other informal own-account workers in the cities of the Global South as petty bourgeois is to align with the NGO-industrial complex and the liberal ruling class when they identify them as entrepreneurs rather than as informal or unemployed workers. In fact, this “entrepreneurial myth,” as I have called it elsewhere,²³ is a key component of the liberal project of denying the world’s workers the identity of worker and thus aims to disempower the potential of transnational working-class solidarity. It is the same strategy which has offered microcredit as the panacea for a lack of jobs across India, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. Identifying those forced to survive as street vendors or as own-account workers as small-business owners or as entrepreneurs (i.e. part of the petty bourgeoisie) is an ideological project meant to deny the agency and class character of the world’s largest working-class segment: it is imperialist, it relegates billions to survival activities, denies them their right to control their labor, and, ultimately, denies them their rightful place in the world communist movement. 

But my argument is also more than a simple argument for the need for a more inclusive definition of the working class. Now that I have demonstrated why own-account workers (and the unemployed and the plethora of other irregular workers) ought to be considered part of the working class, namely its surplus population/reserve army, it is important that we also recognize the important and essential functions that they perform for the reproduction of the capitalist system. This second aspect of my argument is crucial if we are to fully understand their importance and potential power as revolutionary class actors. We can (and ought) to understand the many own-account workers of the world, forced to survive as pauperized, petty-traders, as well as other forms of own-account workers on the streets of crowded urban centers throughout the Global South, as performing socially necessary unproductive labor because they provide cheap goods and services which serve to subsidize global production, consumption, and social reproduction. 

What’s more, I stick by my initial claim that many of the world’s own-account workers/street vendors are also better understood as employees, namely as salespeople and/or as point-of-sale workers, similar to retail workers, who are working for large manufacturers and wholesalers, ensuring commodities produced and sold by capitalist firms reach consumers (i.e. they are essential workers in the realization of capitalist profit). Indeed, the pay made by many of these street vendors and own-account workers, and for many of the world’s still-existing artisans and its millions of homeworkers, is more similar to (or can be understood explicitly as) piece-wages rather than as profits. These individuals do not own any capital, save for maybe a handful of material or goods given to them often on credit by wholesalers, nor do they employ any labor. 

We can point to how Marx demonstrated at length how piece wages are often used in the exploitation of the proletariat, especially its most “the piece wage is the form of wage most appropriate to the capitalist mode of production” and “piece wages become . . . the most fruitful source of reductions in wages, and of frauds committed by the capitalists.”²⁴ Marx’s insight cuts against contemporary Marxist viewpoints which view only wage work as indicative of creating surplus value and regard only the traditional employee-employer relationship as indicative of exploitation and the working class. It remains the case that millions of the world’s workers are not actually paid wages, at least not in the way that we usually conceptualize wages in the West. 

On Class Consciousness

This all leads to Levi’s contentions regarding worker and class consciousness. Levi contends that only certain segments of the working class, namely the industrial workers, can develop the sort of revolutionary class consciousness required for the communist movement. 

In his discussion of Plekhanov, Levi points to insights gleaned from the 1880s and 90s regarding the burgeoning industrial proletariat in Russia. Here, Levi heavily implies that class consciousness emerges organically from the conditions of the factory floor, a very common view among many Marxists today. This same viewpoint is also the basis for his denial of my general argument that nonindustrial and irregular workers are also capable of revolutionary class consciousness and action. Levi states: “By turning to the writing of Lenin and Plekhanov, we can find an especially strong case for the importance of the industrial working class.” Levi then continues, from this point using “working class” as shorthand for the “industrial working class,” stating there arises “a specific consciousness induced by capitalism in the working class.” This industrial working class’s “material circumstances has made it uniquely suited to govern as the ‘universal class’.” What circumstances is Levi referring to? The “conditions of large-scale production . . . particularly the concentration of workers” i.e. the conditions of the factory floor. 

Levi emphasizes this idea again earlier in this piece, when he argues that “A broader network of smaller plants meant less opportunities for workers to collectively organize and develop militant consciousness.” This is perhaps especially ironic given that in the context of previously successful socialist revolutions, such as the Paris Commune, for instance, the vast majority of Parisian workers were working in small shops and factories, not large industrial ones.²⁵

To assume, as Levi does here, that class consciousness and revolutionary class politics emerges organically from the material circumstances of industrial labor under capitalism is indicative of a simplistic and vulgar Marxism. To claim that class consciousness and class formation occur in the same manner today around the world as they did 100-plus years ago in industrializing Europe also assumes, absurdly, that the dynamics and logistics of factories themselves have not changed, a fact which Levi himself points out is not the case throughout the latter portion of his essay when he explores the rise of flexible production and subcontracting in contemporary capitalism. 

The factories of today are themselves full of Isolated, surveilled, and siloed workers, often surrounded more by machines than other workers. They are largely not defined by the mass socialization, opportunities for shared discussions and socializing, and the shared lived experiences that defined the steel mills or textile mills in the US and England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and which produced such militancy as the Homestead Strike of 1892. Indeed, the only places where these idealized and traditionalist factory settings do persist, though even this is debatable, are largely in the informal sector in the textile factories of East Asia where the workers are often conceptualized as own-account workers and NOT employees by both the capitalists and the western proponents of factory-workerism. 

As Levi correctly (and contradictorily) stated elsewhere in his article, the rise of flexible production, outsourcing, and subcontracting in the industrial sector is real and has been occurring for decades now. Further, it is not a natural occurrence but rather a conscious effort on the part of the bourgeoisie to limit worker power and cut production costs–a point Levi makes that I wholeheartedly agree with. In this sense, the rise of informality, non-waged work, contract work, and labor arbitrage is an inherent tendency of the logic of capitalist production. 

But with this important recognition, the central question for Levi and other proponents of factory-workerism now looms even larger: what do we do about this fact? Do we ignore the fact that industrial production has changed? Do we write off those millions of workers who are pushed out of the factories (or were never employed in them) and who are employed in non-traditional and non-industrial settings as incapable of class formation, revolutionary class consciousness, and revolutionary action? 

This sort of chauvinism is exactly the implication of Levi and others’ notions of class consciousness as emerging primarily from production in the idealized factory setting, whereas I am arguing the exact opposite: it is in the unemployed and excluded (from production) portions of the global working class that we must recognize as the heart of the contemporary class struggle if we are to have a shot at socialist revolution today. 

If we do not recognize those members of the working class who are denied formalized and industrial jobs in the production process, we are ignoring the mass of the working class. We are overlooking the revolutionary agents of the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the anti-colonial struggles in Africa. These successes were often carried out, or at least decisively won, with the help of the most disenfranchised and impoverished segments of the working class, the segments with the least to lose and the most righteous anger to channel: the surplus population/reserve army of labor. It is also these segments of the working class that have the least intra-class differences and stratification among them, united in their poverty and destitution.²⁶ These workers are yearning for the guidance of a revolutionary program that can channel their discontent into meaningful change, avoiding the collapse or cooptation of their spontaneous uprisings. If the Arab Spring had been led and channeled by a revolutionary Marxist party, the outcome for Egypt and the entire Middle East would have likely been much different than it is today. 

Defining Deindustrialization and Recognizing its Significance 

Levi’s article and their empirical data on deindustrialization revolves largely around the U.S. context, which is somewhat disingenuous given my initial article was primarily exploring the Global South (and my larger analysis, appearing elsewhere, deals with Africa in particular). However, I will chalk up the confusion to my own piece’s shortcomings, short length, and lack of clarity. 

But first, to discuss Levi’s arguments regarding deindustrialization, we must first ask what deindustrialization means. 

In some sections of their essay, Levi attempts to ignore the realities of deindustrialization by defining deindustrialization (and assuming I was defining deindustrialization) as the total volume of manufactured goods being produced and/or the amount of (dollar) value added in manufacturing. In other sections, Levi uses different definitions of deindustrialization depending upon whichever definition suits their needs. Thus, our discussion of deindustrialization calls for conceptual clarity. 

There are three primary ways we can define deindustrialization: 

1. Deindustrialization as decline in the share of workers employed in industrial production
2. Deindustrialization as a decline in the share of GDP coming from industrial production
3. Deindustrialization as a measure of sheer volume of manufacturing goods produced or as value added by the manufacturing sector 

Deindustrialization in the sense of definitions 1 and 2 are, in fact, occurring throughout the world though geographically unevenly, as I will show. Deindustrialization 1 and 2 are occuring (or have occurred) most intensely in previously industrialized parts of the West but also in the lion’s share of the Global South. At the same time, some parts of the world are not deindustrializing and others are currently industrializing (i.e. Vietnam). This is all part of the new international division of labor that has characterized the neoliberal era (i.e. since the 1970s, or perhaps even a decade or two earlier). But uneven deindustrialization does not mean that deindustrialization is not a reality in many parts of the world and, in many regards, on a global scale, a reality that socialists have to confront. To deny this reality is not only empirically wrong but irresponsible from the point of view of the struggle against capitalism. 

As for deindustrialization definition 3, I never said there has been a decline in the output of manufacturing goods nor equated a decline in the total volume of manufacturing goods with deindustrialization. It must be said, however, that deindustrialization 3 is the least relevant definition of deindustrialization for our purposes of considering the composition of the working class and the nature of the class struggle today. 

In fact, it is crucial to recognize that the volume of manufacturing goods continues to grow, not decline in many parts of the world, especially in the Global North. In other words, in many parts of the Global North, deindustrialization 3 is not occurring, and Levi is correct in this regard. But growing industrial output in high-productivity countries (i.e. countries with intense technological investment) has, ironically, coincided with deindustrialization 1 (in the sense of fewer workers working in industrial production). This makes sense given the general tendency Marx identified as the increasing organic composition of capital. 

Again, deindustrialization 1 and 2 have been occurring in most countries across the Global North as industrialization has shifted to a few key regions (e.g. parts of East Asia). And deindustrialization 1, 2, 3 have also occurred in many parts Global South as much of the world’s economic peripheral regions have been forced into primarization (i.e. a reliance on extractive rather than manufacturing industries) with the imposition of free-trade structural-adjustment-programs (and via other mechanisms) by the IMF in the neoliberal era and according to the logic of comparative advantage. 

Now to the empirical data: Levi supports their claim that there is not a global trend of deindustrialization by referencing World Bank Data of “amount of value added by global manufacturing” which defines value in pure dollar terms (i.e. not value in the Marxist sense), utilizing deindustrialization definition 3. However, when one looks at the same World Bank data but considers the share of industry as a percentage of GDP (deindustrialization 2), the share of global GDP produced via industry (which includes construction and mining which, in the case of mining, I would argue is more accurately and usefully considered part of the primary rather than manufacturing sector and is subject to different labor and capital dynamics than the rest of the sector) has actually declined from 31% in 1991 to 26.4% in 2023.²⁷ In addition, when looking at just manufacturing rather than total industry (but which, in the World Bank Data, also still includes mining), the decline is from 19% in 1991 to 15% in 2023.²⁸ Thus, there is a worldwide trend of deindustrialization 2. 

On the other hand, in terms of deindustrialization 1 (i.e. the share of workers employed in industry), in one sense this number has actually increased from 21% in 1991 to 26%, in 2022, the only years available from the World Bank.²⁹ As stated, however, industry in this dataset includes mining. When we look at just manufacturing, which is more indicative of the ideal factory-setting of commodity production imagined by factory-workerists, the share of workers employed in manufacturing decreased from 14.63% in 2000 to 13.57% in 2022, the only years available in the UN data.³⁰ In either case, it is the rapid industrialization of China and its explosive manufacturing capacity which has sustained the industrial share of employment around the world as the share of industrial workers elsewhere has declined or stagnated (for example: 19.60% of workers in Europe worked in manufacturing in 2000, compared to just 14.85% in 2021).³¹ For a longer time series and another perspective, we can look to IMF data. According to the IMF, manufacturing employment as a share of total employment in “emergent and developing economies” (i.e. what this essay has referred to as the Global South) peaked in the 1970s in the low teens and has been slightly declining since, while the share of manufacturing employment in “advanced economies” has been sharply declining for five decades.³²  The share of manufacturing employment in China, on the other hand, has sharply increased.³³ Thus, we can reasonably affirm the worldwide trend of deindustrialization 1. 

Regarding the rise of the service sector, in 1991 only 35% of the world’s workers were employed in the service sector. Today, that number is 50%, meaning half the world’s workers work in the service sector while the agricultural and industrial sectors comprise the rest.³⁴ In the Global North, the increase in the share of service sector employment has largely occurred due to industrial workers shifting to service jobs amidst deindustrialization. In the Global South, the increase in the service sector is largely the result of the decline in the peasant population (due to primitive accumulation and the privatization of land) and the rise of urbanization and the urban informal economy. The global share of workers employed in agriculture decreased from 43% in 1991 to 26% by 2022. This clearly has major implications for the class struggle and class composition we cannot ignore. The decline of agricultural workers reflects the major world-historical trend of the integration of the globe, including precapitalist agricultural populations, into the world capitalist economy in the era of neoliberal globalization and, attendantley, one of the most consequential social trends of the twenty-first century: urbanization without industrialization. Socialists must account for this trend. 

Levi does attempt to clarify the decline of the share of workers employed in manufacturing when they state, “the world produces more things, with more condensed labor, than ever before.” The key word here is condensed, which is to say with less. Levi wants to argue that a shrinking industrial working class does not entail challenges for the workers movement, but rather offers potential advantages because, following the factory-workerist logic, this means fewer workers have more power and thus that socialists must organize fewer industries and workers to challenge capitalism. That this argument is indicative of economism and factory-workerism is apparent, but it is also an extremely simplistic and optimistic take on the difficult terrain for the socialist struggle today that offers little of use. 

Now to the US case specifically, which is indicative of the broader Global North: to support this claim that the US has not experienced deindustrialization, Levi uses a single graph showing a steady share of manufacturing as a portion of GDP in the U.S. covering the years of 1947-1997. In other words, Levi only uses deindustrialization 2 to prove their point. However, if we look at more recent years, the share of industry as a portion of GDP declined from 23% in 1997 to less than 18% in 2021, thereby affirming deindustrialization 2.³⁵ 

Further, if we look at the US in terms of deindustrialization 1, we can see the following: in 1979 at the start of the neoliberal turn, 19.6 million Americans worked in manufacturing. By 2019, only 12.8 million Americans worked in manufacturing, a decline of 6.7 million workers (or 35 percent),³⁶ despite the U.S. population growing by nearly 100 million people over the same period. To put things in even starker terms, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 1910 an estimated 32.4% of US workers worked in manufacturing. In 2015, that number had declined to 8.7%.³⁷ To argue this does not amount to deindustrialization is highly problematic and the burden lies on Levi to argue why we should not characterize it as such and why socialists in the US should not adjust our strategy accordingly. 

To summarize, Levi only uses the least relevant and most problematic definition of deindustrialization 3 to argue that deindustrialization is not occurring on a world scale, ignoring the more pertinent and strategically important definitions 1 and 2. Perhaps more crucially, Levi also fails to acknowledge the central importance of geographic context when considering deindustrialization and when considering strategy and struggle. Indeed, Levi’s passing comment that “deindustrialization occurred as a local or regional phenomena, but not a national or global one” underlies one of the most problematic aspects of his entire piece: an implied assertion that regional and local dynamics are irrelevant for making revolution when the opposite is, in fact, true. Revolutions happen nationally, though they must nonetheless be part of an international project. 

Why Levi is so adamant about denying deindustrialization is indicative of the dogma of a backwards-looking factory-workerism which reduces Marxism to the empirical findings of its classical texts and Marxist analysis to a vulgar materialism only applicable to an economic landscape which looks very much like the days of classic industrialization in Western Europe and North America of the 19th and early 20th centuries. For factory-workerists, if the industrial proletariat has declined, their very conception of Marxism and, thus, of revolution is threatened. Or, on the other hand, if manufacturing has changed places geographically, the potential for revolution has merely shifted geographically. According to this latter logic, it is only among the manufacturing masses of China, the industrial workforce of today’s world, that we can expect class consciousness and a successful socialist movement to arise. What the rest of the non-industrialized and de-industrialized workers of the world are to do, and what role they are to play in the revolution, is not of apparent prime concern to the factory-workerists. 

Regardless, the usage of less industrial labor to produce more manufactured goods is the very essence of the Marxist analysis of the capitalist system. To deny that the share of labor engaged in direct, industrial commodity production declines as capitalism progresses is to contradict not just one or two of Marx’s statements, but to undermine the entire program of Marx’s understanding of capitalism and the inherent growth of the organic composition of capital, which is further fundamental to his entire analysis of the trends of capital accumulation such as the declining rate of profit, recurrent crises, etc. 

What’s more, that Marx considers those members of the reserve army created via primitive accumulation and/or displaced due to the decreasing ratio of variable (labor) to constant (machinery) capital in the production process as indicative of the proletariat generally is clear through his work, including in his many descriptions of the experiences of the urban poor, the pauperized, and the newly proletarianized (but not employed) throughout his body of work. If Marx did not consider those individual laborers who were not directly employed in the industrial production process as part of the working class, the entire Marxist conception of the working class, of capitalism, and of the struggle for communism would collapse in a mess of semantic and analytical juggling, much like the entire Analytical Marxist project. 

To be sure, it is true, as Levi asserts, that the world still has an industrial base. It would be foolish to deny otherwise. But it is also true that this industrial base has shifted largely towards East and Southeast Asia and other parts of the Global South (such as Northern Mexico). According to Levi’s logic, however, these earth-shattering changes have little-to-no implications for the nature of the class struggle. 

“We must continue to privilege the productive-structural power of factory workers in the struggle, because they are the true working class,” the factory-workerists shout. But if industry has left Pittsburgh for China, are we to just abandon the possibility of class struggle in Pittsburgh because industry is now elsewhere? Is the Marxist movement irrelevant for the West African context because there is almost no industrial class there whatsoever? “Don’t worry, the struggle is global, and there is still industrial manufacturing in other parts of the world, so we must stay the course. The service workers in Buffalo or the own-account workers in Africa need only trail behind the industrial masses of the newly industrial areas of the world,” is the refrain of the factory-workerists. This view is not only defeatist and chauvinist, it is also ignorant of the way global forces shape local contexts, of the development of capitalism, of the way that the class struggle is total and generalized yet also contextual and geographically bounded, and of the way that imperialism and uneven development occurs. Such a view abandons the class struggle among the world’s most exploited and destitute workers. It offers nothing of substance to the billions of workers around the world who struggle and die in poverty daily. It is born from a world view bound by a narrow and backwards-looking European experience, and it is blinded in its consideration only of factory workers as the decisive members (indeed, in its most extreme tendencies, the only members) of the working class.

Taking Imperialism and Underdevelopment Seriously: Recognizing the Broad and Global Nature of the Working Class

In the latter sections of his essay, I by-and-large agree with Levi. The problem is that the first half of the essay is very much counter to what is argued in the second half. For instance, it is true, as Levi asserts, that Marx never intended to use the productive/unproductive labor distinction as a class distinction, and to use such a distinction as indicative of class formation or class belonging is indicative of the non-dialectical nature of Analytical Marxism and the dogmatic Stalinism that infests online leftist spaces. As Levi says, there is no pure proletariat. I agree. To uphold a proletarian purity is to doom the worker struggle to paralyzing semantics conducive to little more than intellectual circle-jerking.  

Yet, in his blanket denial that own-account workers are part of the proletariat in the first section of the essay, Levi perpetuates a limiting proletariat puritanism. For instance, Levi states in the second half of the essay that “own-account workers constitute a census category, not a stable grouping. This category includes a myriad of occupations and financial arrangements; some are proletarian in all but name, some are closer to small capitalists.” I could not agree more, but this is explicitly at odds with Levi’s earlier blanket assertion that own-account workers are “members of the petty-bourgeois class.” 

In sum, it is readily apparent from Levi’s essay that he does not consider the Global South, and especially the African, context in his conceptions of global capitalism. Levi’s view, and the view of the factory-workerists, is tainted by a Eurocentrism and a backwards looking biblicism which must be challenged. 

For example, when Levi speaks about own-account workers he speaks about small scale peasants, petty producers and craftsmen, and other middle peasant populations of the type that existed in Russia and China (indeed, around the world), in the early 20th century. But that is not who the own-account workers in Africa and across the Global South are today. Levi assumes that in my paper I was speaking of peasant populations which are roughly equivalent to the middle peasant populations in Russia in the early 20th century, but I am speaking of a qualitatively different population of urban informal/irregular workers born of different global dynamics and in a different context. And herein lies the heart of both Levi’s and many contemporary Marxists’ flawed analyses: rather than analyzing the concrete situation in the contemporary world, he uncritically applies an analysis borne of the concrete circumstances of Eastern Europe over 100 years ago! 

To elaborate: the proliferation of own-account workers across the world today is not born of an inevitable transition from an agricultural to capitalist industrial economy that appeared to be occurring at the turn of the 20th century, as the factory-workerists imply. Instead, today’s own-account workers are born of the maturation of the underdevelopment of capitalist development in the Global South due to the structures of capitalist imperialism and the evolution of the capitalist system as whole. This point is perhaps the primary contribution of Lenin to Marxist theory, a contribution which was expounded by Mao, Guevara, and others: imperialism leads to the distortion and underdevelopment of the capitalist productive forces that were seen in Western Europe. I find it ironic that the factory-workerists ignore this heart of Lenin’s insights of imperialism while claiming adherence to Lenin’s thought. 

An industrial class is likely not coming to Africa any time soon, at least not most parts of the continent. At the same time, the peasant class is declining, and a dispossessed urban proletariat is booming in numbers previously unimaginable. This process of urbanization and proletarianization without industrialization is central for Marxists to consider and make sense of if the struggle for Communism is to gain any sort of purchase in Africa and across the Global South today.³⁸ To ignore the dispossessed urban workers in Africa, to simply call them the industrial reserve army and leave it at that or, worse, to call them petty bourgeois, to deny their revolutionary potential just because they do not work for a wage or are forced to sell petty goods on the street to survive, is anti-Revolutionary.  

And while Lenin’s and Plekhanov’s analyses, which Levi cites, can and should be emulated in terms of their form and method, Levi emulates their analyses in substance as well. This is a trend that must end if we are to truly comprehend the nature of the capitalist system today. Again, most of Levi’s quotes from Plekhanov and Lenin do not apply to the African context nor to my paper, because I am not referring to peasants at all. The own-account workers I am speaking of are not peasants, but rather urban dwellers divorced from the means of production. If we must find a classic equivalent, they are probably most like the urban poor of Victorian London, Paris, or Prussia who Marx viewed as so imbued with a proletarian nature and who he lauded on many occasions, whether during the days of the Paris Commune or in his praise of the Silesian Weavers.

Even though the site of production is central in some areas of the class struggle (such as Eastern China, or an Arkansas auto plant), it does not mean that production is the primary site of the class struggle in every context. We must look at the nature of capitalism in every geographic and historical context if we are to know what form the struggle must take. It will not look the same everywhere. To say that power and revolutionary potential only lies with an industrial proletariat is to deny the very nature of uneven development and imperialism and to cut off hope for the socialist revolution to come, especially for the Global South. 

The rise of irregular labor is exactly the consequence of Marx’s recognition of the growing share of inorganic capital: the development of technology, the growing immiseration of the working class and the inherent tendencies of imperialism which fetter the development of the productive forces in the subjugated parts of the world, as anticipated by Marx and Engels in their discussion of the labor aristocracy and their pointed critiques of the trade union movement in Western Europe, especially in their later years. 

In closing, the global communist movement must be empirically rigorous, theoretically sound, and socially inclusive. This means we can no longer privilege certain types of workers over others or continue to overlook the class nature and revolutionary potential of so many of the world’s irregular laborers. We must put forward a more complex and empirically rigorous notion of the relative surplus population/the reserve army of labor and we must recognize the crucial role that so many of the world’s irregular workers play in value production and realization and in the social and political reproduction of the capitalist world system. The entire movement depends upon it.

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1. Jules, “Requiem for the Baristas,” Other Worlds Than These, July 22 2022, https://julesnotes.substack.com/p/requiem-for-the-baristas.
2. I follow the example of Nick Bernards and his great book The Global Governance of Precarity: Primitive Accumulation and the Politics of Irregular Work.
3. The industrial reserve army being one portion/aspect of the relative surplus population.
4. Analytical Marxism in the US today is arguably most associated and influenced by the work of US sociologist Erik Olin Wright.
5. Erik Olin Wright, ed, Approaches to Class Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
6. Alexander Galls, “Class power and union capacities: A research note on the power resources approach,” Global Labour Journal 9, no. 3 (2018): 348–52.
7. Kim Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket Books, 2017).
8. The term “sociologist” here may also be taken as an underhanded reference to the fact that I am an assistant professor of sociology at a small university in Louisiana, though I am uncertain if Levi is aware of this fact or not.
9. Karl Von Holdt and Edward Webster, “Organising on the Periphery: New Sources of Power in the South African workplace,” Employee Relations 30, no. 4 (2008): 333–54, https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/01425450810879330/full/html.
10. As I have critiqued elsewhere, the proliferation of various types of power in the Power Resources Approach points to the more fundamental shortcoming of the epistemology of the analytical approach: its failure to recognize the dialectical and interconnected nature of social, economic, and political life (and thus of power) inherent in capitalist class society.
11. J. Moufawad-Paul, Politics in Command: A Taxonomy of Economism (Foreign Language Press, 2022).
12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm/.
13. Katy Fox-Hodess, “Worker Power, Trade Union Strategy, and International Connections,” Latin American Politics and Society 61, no. 3 (2019).
14. Martin Danyluk, “Seizing the Means of Circulation: Choke Points and Logistical Resistance in Coco Solo, Panama,” Antipode 55, no. 5 (2022): 1369.
15. Ibrahim Abdullah, “Bushpath to Destruction: The Origin and Character of the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone,” Journal of Modern African Studies 36, no. 2 (1998).
16. Nicholas Thoburn, “Difference in Marx: The Lumpenproletariat and  the Proletarian Unnamable.” Economy & Society 31, no. 3 (2002).
17. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/.
18. Ibid, 66.
19. Of course, Marx also viewed nonindustrial workers as part of the working class. In addition, Marx viewed socially necessary but unproductive labor as essential for the functioning of the capitalist system and unproductive workers as members of the working class. I mention these last two points, because my own argument for recognizing informal workers and own-account workers as part of the global working class is, in essence, no more complex than these three insights: 1. unemployed, irregular, and informal workers (including most own-account workers) are members of the working class; 2. nonindustrial workers are members of the working class; and 3. unproductive workers are members of the working class.
20. By the ILO definition, own-account workers are not employers.
21. Marx also referred to himself as a pauper: Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918), https://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/ch08.htm.
22. Note, I do think it is more accurate to limit the scope of own-account workers belonging to the surplus army of labor to those in the informal sector, and thus my definition of own-account workers who are part of the surplus population diverges from the ILO definition, which can include formally registered own-account workers.
23. Joshua Lew McDermott, “Understanding West Africa’s informal workers as working class,” Review of African Political Economy 48, no. 170 (2021), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354884406_Understanding_West_Africa’s_informal_workers_as_working_class.
24. “Chapter 21: Piece Wages,” https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg21.html.
25. Pierre Milza, La Commune de 1871 (Perrin, 2009).
26. The working class in Sierra Leone, for instance, is remarkably unified in their material conditions, with the almost total absence of a middle class in the country. Over 90% of the workers in Sierra Leone are informal, and around 60% are own-account workers.
27. “Industry (including construction), value added (% of GDP),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.TOTL.ZS?end=2023&skipRedirection=true&start=1991&view=chart.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. “Manufacturing jobs as a share of total employment, 2000 to 2021,” https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/manufacturing-share-of-total-employment?tab=chart.
31. Ibid.
32. IMF, “Manufacturing Jobs: Implications for Productivity and Inequality,” Chapter 3 in April 2018 Economic Outlook, 2.
33. Ibid.
34. “Employment in agriculture (% of total employment) (modeled ILO estimate),” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS?skipRedirection=true.
35. “DataBank – World Development Indicators,” https://databank.worldbank.org/reports.aspx?source=2&series=SL.IND.EMPL.ZS&country=.
36. Katelynn Harris, “Forty years of falling manufacturing employment,” Beyond the Numbers 9, no. 16 (November 2020), https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/forty-years-of-falling-manufacturing-employment.htm.
37. “Employment by industry, 1910 and 2015,” https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-by-industry-1910-and-2015.htm.
38. In the sense of being divorced from the means of production, not in the narrow sense of being actively engaged in wage-labor.