The last thing Marx stresses about this class struggle and the capitalist system, in which it
takes the form of the tensions between employers and employees, is to note that it changes.
Class structures of any kind have always changed. You know, the class structure of slavery,
the master and the slave, have very similar problems. Those are two classes the master wasn't
accountable to the slaves, and the slave was the property of the master. That was a class structure
and a class struggle and it's gone because people blew it away, refused to continue after long
experience. And the same is true of feudalism, and the same will be true of capitalism. At least
that's the reasonable expectation Marx wants to set before us. Another implication of Marx's
analysis, one that he didn't have the time to work out because he he died at a relatively young age,
was the fact that if the state takes over (which in some societies it has, partly or completely)
that may not change all that much. If the state continues to organize enterprises and workplaces
in the form of a tiny group of people making all the decisions sitting at the top, the employer,
and the mass of people who are in the employee position, it will not matter all that much that
it's a state enterprise as opposed to a private one, because it hasn't gotten away from the
contradiction, the conflict, the struggle, the class struggle, because it hasn't done away with
the class difference, with the class structure of production. Moving from a private to a state
enterprise without changing that isn't what Marx had in mind. And here Marx becomes a philosopher
again, which is how he started as a young man. Everything he says suggests its opposite.
The history of the human race when it went through its slavery phase, its feudalism phase, and now
its capitalism phase, always with a class structure and class struggle: a small group
(masters, feudal lords, employers in capitalism) and a large group (slaves, serfs, employee)
each of those gives people the idea that things could be other than they are.
And you know what the other is? A society whose workplaces are not divided between a small group
who run the show and a mass of people who are alienated from running the show. It doesn't have
to. You're being stuck in that position is what gives you the imaginary alternative. Suppose,
Marx says, that we could have in our minds the alternative that the workplace, the enterprise,
is a democratic community not divided between a minority on top and a majority underneath.
And we have a name for that, don't we? And you know it from this program.
It's a worker cooperative. It's a situation where one person, one vote, we all decide together,
democratically. What to produce, how to produce, where to produce, and what to do with the output.
We are no longer alienated because it's ours, and we run it, and we have the vested interest,
and we will have initiative an incentive because we will be the beneficiaries, all of us,
of whatever each of us contributes. So the irony is class divided societies
develop the vision of their own negation, Hegel would say. That is they understand
that one could go beyond the trap they're in. It's like understanding that you could have a
different relationship than the one you're in. The very difficulties of the one you're in give
you insights into what you would rather be in, what alternative relationships might look like.