Proletariat of Human Condition Versus the Proletariat of Labor

Abstract

In “The International of Decent Feelings,” Althusser sets himself to polemicize against Christian apocalyptical readings of the (back-then) contemporary texts which attempted to read the predicament of the beginning of the Cold War. The fear of atomic bombs as a consequence of the Cold War was indeed real, but “proletarization” of the people (“we are all victims”) from all classes of the social whole. The Marxist side of Althusser comes to say that such a generalization of the “proletariat” as a class in the general population is in fact a negation of the specificity of the proletarian class position, as well as the specific contradiction of the political, economic, and ideological struggle of the proletarian against the dominating classes. The threat of the atomic bomb cannot be used as an excuse for the everyday exploitation of the proletarians and the other poor. In the same text, Althusser polemicizes against the back-then prevailing discourses of equality of all the people in front of their misery, guilt, poverty, and alienation of the human condition. All the subjects, despite their class position, equally experience all this. According to Althusser, this discourse replaces the recognition of our equality before God with our equality before our fear of death, atomic threats, and so on. In Althusser’s perspective, this position is anti-Christian on two levels. It favors idolatry (our death equals us with God), and it fails to recognize the existence of the proletariat, whose emancipation cannot be accomplished by reappropriating the products of human labor, which has been encapsulated by the feeling of fear.