Can a political movement overcome the limitations of the class it positively identifies with?

Socialists of most kinds traditionally have identified themselves with the working class as social roots, cultural roots, voters, members, and whose interests they fight for. This inlcudes both social democrats and revolutionary socialists, who at some time had the abolution of capitalism and wage labour on their program.

A few days ago I had the pleasure of hearing Moishe Postone speaking about marxism and the Frankfurt school. He briefly spoke about the crucial problem of "transhistorical labour" in traditional marxism which he wrote about at length in his book Time, Labour and Social Domination. I consider that one of the most important marxist works ever, although it is not an easy one.

The argument is that traditional marxism does not see, which Postone argues that Marx did, that labour under capitalism has a very specific form which is inevitably tied to capitalism as a system. That is, wage labour in a labour market with money as universal equivalent.

In traditional marxism, markets, private property and capitalist owners are the defining features of capitalism. This led to a number of problems when these defining features started to become seriously diminished in the 1930s in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and then later in the war economy in the US and in the post-war boom in Western Europe. Could this really be growth of socialism?

Quite a number of revolutionary socialists who had no doubts about the true authoritarian nature of the Soviet Union said a qualified "yes" in the case of the Soviet Union. It had the economic basis of socialism, and only a political revolution was needed, then it would be true socialism.

The social democrats on the other hand initially saw their project as one of gradual introduction of socialism and abolition of capitalism through abolution of the market and more state property. That didn't exactly pan out as originally planned.

The argument of a number of theorists (such as Cliff, Dunayevskaya, Horkheimer, Pollock and Postone) is that there regimes represented not a break with capitalism at all, but a kind of state capitalism. Their arguments are varied. I think the crucial point is that capitalism is not defined by markets, property relations or capitalists, but by the specific form of production that is carried out by the woking class.

This means that a political project constructed around a positive identification with and transfer of power to the working class cannot go beyond capitalism. To go beyond capitalism would mean to abolish the working class, not just the capitalist class.

By analogy, one would not work for the abolishment of slavery by positively identifying with the slave class. We can identify with slaves only negatively, as something one should not be, a state of affairs that should be ended, not promoted. One did not fight for the well-being of slaves, but against cruel treatment of slaves, which was generalized as the cruelty of slavery as an institution.

The conclusion Horkheimer and Pollock drew from this was a deep pessimism about the possibility of socialism. Without seeing the world from the standpoint of the working class, much seems to be lost from marxism. That is not a necessary conclusion, I think. Rather, I think a socialism that avoids the huge gap between the classless socialism of the distant future and the working class politics of today would be more viable, not less. I do not believe the socialist vision of the entire society organized as the German post office, as Lenin put it, appeals a lot to people today.

Discuss.