Notes on defining the working class

Stephanie McMillan posts some Notes on defining the working class.

McMillan insists that:

The point that is often forgotten though, and which I am insisting upon, is that productive workers, the working class, as the ones who are at the core (or foundation) of the entire capitalist economy, who produce the surplus value that allows the existence of profit and its re-investment as new capital, is the only class in fundamental antagonistic contradiction to capital. By emancipating themselves as workers, they have to destroy all the myriad social relations (in the economic, political and ideological fields) that make up capitalism. This puts them in a unique position.

From MacMillan's description, I assume she means that these workers are in Department II. It is these workers alone that produce the surplus value that Capitalists turn into profits.

This poses an interesting problem with the decline in absolute and relative numbers of productive workers. If the whole of Department II were to be automated, would McMillan say that a proletarian revolution would be impossible because the true proletariat no longer exists?

MacMillan goes on to say that:

Workers who produce surplus value are the only ones who, by asserting their interests and following them through to their endpoint–stopping exploitation–can end the production of surplus value, and thus the reproduction of capital. Only they can follow through to the goal of overturning capitalism. No other classes will go that far (and that has been shown, historically, time and time again). This is why the working class must lead the revolutionary process, if we are to achieve the defeat of capitalism. They have to build an alliance with all the other dominated classes, who will together overturn the system. But their line must lead, or capitalism will be quickly reproduced/restored (as occurred in the Soviet Union and China).

This would mean that the proletariat (workers in Department II) have a limited time in which to launch a true proletarian revolution before their class is annihlated through automation.

The problem for advanced economies like Australia, revolutionary consciousness is more likely to arise among the intellectual working classes: professionals; artisans; relatively privileged ones. This consciousness is driven by the precarious nature of the working life. And it would tend to be conservative in nature in order to keep the status quo.

This is probably why advanced economies would tend to go Fascist rather than Communistic in times of crises.