The New Global Class Architecture:

 

Neoliberalism and Class Formation

 

Eddie J. Girdner, Izmir University

 

(Published in the Turkish Yearbook of International Relations, No. 37, 2006.)  

 

 

“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”

                                                                                  The Communist Manifesto[1]

 

“And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? …by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”

 

                                                                                  The Communist Manifesto[2]

 

“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”

 

                                                                                  The Communist Manifesto[3]

 

“In really-existing capitalism, class struggle, politics, the state, and the logics of capital accumulation are inseparable.”

 

                                                                                  Samir Amin[4]

 

 

            Actually-existing neo-liberal capitalism inevitably creates crucial contradictions which cannot be overcome.[5] Among these are the inability to generate sufficient employment, inequality on a global scale, the continuation of imperialism and imperialist wars, continued enclosure of the earth’s resources, pauperization, ecological crises, over-production and under consumption, the enormous waste of human potential on a global scale, and the forging of a global working class which is in an ever more precarious position even as net global wealth increases. At the same time, neoliberalism tends to fragment consciousness, drowning class awareness in a sea of consumerism, which is making organizing and class struggle more difficult.

            All of these crucial contradictions were evident leading up

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