ABSTRACT
Bahro has some highly important things to say about the role assigned by Marxist theory to the proletariat. ‘That the proletariat . . . is the actual collective subject of general emancipation remains a philosophical hypothesis, in which the utopian components of Marxísm are concentrated.’84 He also writes that ‘Marxist intellectuals have an idealised picture of “the worker”’. What, he asks, about the ideas and aspirations of the really existing proletariat, their relationship (if any) to its ‘real’ ‘world-historical’ aims assigned to it by the theory? After all, as he also remarked, ‘the immediate objectives of subordinate strata and classes are always conservative’.85
