12. 'PARTIAL' STRUGGLES: A REACTIONARY DEAD-END

The decadence of capitalism has accentuated the decomposition of all the moral values of capitalism and has led to a profound degradation of all human relations.

However, while it is true that the proletarian revolution will engender new relationships in every area of life, it is wrong to think that it is possible to contribute to the revolution by organising specific struggles around partial problems, such as racism, the position of women, pollution, sexuality, and other aspects of daily life.

The struggle against the economic foundations of the system contains within it the struggle against all the super-structural aspects of capitalist society, but this is not true the other way around. By their very content ‘partial’ struggles, far from reinforcing the vital autonomy of the proletariat, tend on the contrary to dilute it into a mass of confused categories (races, sexes, youth, etc.) which can only be totally impotent in the face of history. This is why bourgeois governments and political parties have learned to recuperate and use them to good effect in the preservation of the social order.