Marginalized groups can no longer occupy the proletariat’s revolutionary role

Evidence

Virtually Marx’s first published essay, the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in a remarkable philosophical leap discovered just such a new subject of history -the proletariat. Marx’s early format was then maintained for other such now marginal subjects -blacks, women, the Third World, even, somewhat abusively, students — in the rewriting of the doctrine of “radical chains” during the 1960s. Now, however, in the pluralism of the collective groups, and no matter how “radical” the immiseration or the marginalization of the group in question, it can no longer fill that structural role, for the simple reason that the structure has been modified and the role suppressed. Historically, this is scarcely surprising, since the transitional nature of the new global economy has not yet allowed its classes to form in any stable way, let alone to acquire genuine class consciousness, so that the very lively social struggles of the current period are largely dispersed and anarchic. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 749

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s aim of mapping her own position in the world system — the structural role she might occupy has been suppressed. — connects to: Neither bourgeoisie nor proletariat now act as agents of historical transformation — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 91; Marginal outcasts are revolutionary even without revolutionary consciousness — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2584; No social group has an a priori privileged revolutionary role. — Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason, 299
• QUESTION: Is the claim that class consciousness is impossible under transitional globalization falsifiable, or empirically testable against current labor organizing?