Who Is The New Proletariat?

In Western history before Marx,the concept of the proletariat was a stigmatized symbol of poverty and degradation,and generally referred to marginalized groups at the bottom of society.Since Marx founded the theory of the proletariat in 1843,the proletariat began to step on the historical stage with a progressive revolutionary image and become the classic political subject.Marx’s proletariat is a compound concept,which has generated radical negative connotation in the critical context of legal philosophy,acquired social empirical significance in the critical perspective of national economics,and has been applied in the practical practice of political struggle.It presents a three-dimensional structure,which includes "the civil social class of noncivil social class","the modern working class for hire" and "the real revolutionary class".However,with the qualitative change of western capitalist society in the second half of the 20th century,the industrial employment working class as the source of the proletariat gradually disappeared,the revolutionary passion and consciousness continuously degraded,and the grand narrative revolutionary appeal with the goal of human liberation suffered radical deconstruction."The theory of the demise of the proletariat" was in vogue.Contemporary Western radical left thinkers,such as Negri,Agamben and ?i?ek,take the opposite approach and try to answer the question of who can become the new political body to overturn the capitalist order after the working class.Around this general problem,they construct a new political subject,which presents a research picture of the coexistence of three heterogeneous theoretical paradigms: production paradigm,legal paradigm and spillover paradigm.Negri’s political subjects are the multitude shaped by immaterial labor and belong to the paradigm of production.In the social network of extensive cooperation,the multitude independently produce immaterial products such as ideas,symbols and intelligence,produce new commonality,and create life and political surplus value extracted by financial capital.The multitude are immaterial workers,life political labor,or machinic assemblage.The transformation of the modern capitalist mode of production makes all the revolutionary organizations no longer rely on the traditional party political way,but adopt the combination of tactical leadership and strategic movement.The political subject of Agamben is homo sacer under the rule of the sovereign,which belongs to the legal paradigm.The sovereign produces naked life in two ways-inclusive exclusion and exclusive inclusion,namely,the humanization of animals and the animalization of humans,which makes the sacred man in a paradoxical zone that can not be distinguished between human and animal.Its typical image is the pariah in Hegel’s rabble and the Jews in the concentration camp.The plan of homo sacer to deal with the biopolitical control is based on the impotentiality theory as the ontology,and the operation mechanism of sovereign power is suspended,which is manifested in the desanctifying operations such as games and profane in the real life of capitalism.The political subject of ?i?ek is the pure empty excluded,which belongs to the excess paradigm.It is the surplus produced by the normal operation of the global capitalist political and economic order.The political subject of ?i?ek is the the barred subject in the Lacanian sense,the state depicted in Hegel’s World of night.The excluded have experienced the fourfold proletarianizations.They are deprived of the substantive content of human being and become the substanceless subjectivity,which is represented by the slum residents as the body.The revolutionary actions of the exclude modeled themselves on Lenin.Radical left thinkers have a great debate about the subject of politics,and this internal debate has revealed the value and limits of their own theories.The original value of the radical left political subject theory is reflected in the promotion of Marx’s classic political subject theory: Negri reconstructed the classic proletarian theory mainly on the basis of the transformation of the capitalist mode of production,Agamben promoted the development of the classic proletarian theory mainly in the aspect of capitalist political criticism,and ?i?ek injected Lacanian psychoanalytic resources into the classic proletarian theory to answer the question of the proletarian class consciousness from the individual microscopic perspective.The revolutionary potential of marginal groups,which is relatively ignored by classical proletarian theory,is explored.In-depth study of the radical left political subject theory is of great significance for understanding the new changes of contemporary capitalism and promoting the new development of the critical theory of capitalism.