Prefiguring Non-Alienation: The Struggle Against Workers’ Disempowerment

My presentation understands Marxist capitalist alienation, as the phenomenon responsible for the disempowerment of the labour movement. Revolutionary movements consist of workers, who are the political products of the economic system. As such, anti-capitalist movements reflect the alienated relations of the workers with their labor, their product of labor, other people, and their human nature. Alienation fragments them; due to the estrangement of the individual from society, other people are considered obstacles to self-realization, instead of supportive comrades. Thus, workers are separated from people of their class and fail to turn to collective, political solutions to their unhappiness. Moreover, capital keeps a tamed, docile workers’ movement by stripping it of its belligerence. This succeeds due to the alienation of the worker from his intellectual activity, as well as feelings of powerlessness and defeatism against a system that exists independently of peoples’ will. The question arises: How can the labour movement empower itself toward a revolutionary alternative?

The form of a vanguard workers’ party as the political instrument that could empower workers is dismissed as another structure that sustains alienated relations. Hence, the strategy of bottom-up, local, prefigurative projects is proposed. If the disempowerment of the proletariat is due to its alienation from human productive nature and the sense of belonging with other people, then the de-alienating structure and relations in the here and now will slowly turn the workers into non-alienated humans who can act towards the future socialist society. These experiments allow people to engage in joint political processes and imagine an alternative reality, as they engage with aspects of their imagined future society. Thus, prefigurative entities can be a revolutionary long-term process that enables the labour movement to reclaim its faith in joint political processes while overcoming the limits imposed by political cynicism and the feeling of fruitfulness.