multitude

[joanna bujes]

At 09:34 PM 02/26/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Moreover there are passages in Marx where the working class loses the
>physiognomic features of 'people' and acquires those of 'multitude'. One
>example: let us think about the last chapter of the first volume of Das
>Kapital where Marx analyses the condition of the working class in the
>United States (Chapter 25 [sic], 'The modern theory of colonisation').
>There we find great pages on the American West, on exodus and on the
>individual initiative of the 'many'. European workers driven out of their
>countries by epidemics, famine and economic crisis, go to labour in the
>large industrial centres on the east coast of the USA, mind you: they stay
>there for several years, only several years. Then they desert the factory
>and move towards the west, towards the free land. Wage labour presents
>itself as a transitional episode rather than a life sentence. Even if only
>for twenty years, wage labourers had the possibility of spreading disorder
>in the iron laws of the labour market; by abandoning their own initial
>condition, they determined the relative scarcity of labour and thus wage
>increases. By describing this situation, Marx offers a vivid portrait of a
>working class that is also multitude.

OK. I don't get it. That "wild west" they were headed for was inhabited. 
The transformation of the working class into a multitude did not include 
the multitude of native indians. And where is that wild west now within 
which the working class can be transformed into multitude.

Joanna