MSZ (September 1988)
The question, so popular in leftist circles, “Why don't the workers make revolution?” but keep capitalism running, is a false question.
It lives on the assumption that the “little people” are bound to do something other than what they already do. They are not, however, bound to do anything else at all. It is put so smoothly, as if there were a higher necessity bestowed upon the proletariat which it has to obey, whether it wants to or not. Such a lawfulness is brought about neither by nature nor by “history,” but solely by the idealism of vulgar-materialist worldviews.
Because capitalism, with its regime of business and power, gives the wage earners enough reasons for a revolution, this in no way means – as is suggested – that it is therefore “inevitable.” Exploitation is not a stimulus to which the workers would (must) react with a conditioned reflex by abolishing it. Whether they proceed to fight against the system of wage labor is a question of insight into the nature of the capitalist class antagonism and the will to end it. Otherwise precisely nothing happens, i.e. the old shit continues!
The question why “the masses” do not make revolution acts as if these masses constantly grapple with a problem: whether at the moment they should join in or overturn the whole business. However, nobody who joins in has this problem. In any case, no worker asks himself before he goes to the factory in the morning whether or not he would actually rather be the “historical subject of the revolution.” He goes because he needs money, and afterwards goes home, where he sees how far he can stretch his narrow means. Nothing is more stupid than the idea that he does so against his “real mission.”
Nowadays, the whole question is posed only rhetorically by Hirsch, Essen and co. for the fertilization of philosophical seminar debates. It is already meant as an answer, namely in this way: the mere fact that the revolution has not taken place down until today is nevertheless probably argument enough. And indeed to explain the reasons for revolution as invalid. Thus the metaphysical determinist theory is not criticized, but applied creatively, by spelling the motto backwards: where no uprising happens, it is obviously not (any longer) necessary! “Necessary” and appropriate are therefore always exactly the “resistance” and the “social movements” that just exist – because: otherwise there would not be this, but rather something else. So eco-greens and feminism come to academic appreciation for the same reason that the self-created bogeyman of a proletarian mission is always historical-philosophically and sociologically buried anew.