[Marxism] Class structure and class politics (III)

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

CLASS FORMATION AND CLASS POLITICS

Even if we are able to establish the class identity of a particular
section of working people, this does not necessarily tell us how they
are likely to behave politically in a given situation. This applies not
merely to those strata whose status has been the subject of debate (as
discussed above), but even to those who are unambiguously part of the
working class. One of the major theoretical advances of Marxism in the
twentieth century was the general abandonment of any assumption that
workers' political behaviour will correspond to their objective class
location (or that it will do so once their 'real interests' have been
pointed out to them, causing any temporary confusion created by
bourgeois ideology to disappear). Classes, after all, do not have a
concrete existence. 'Class' is an analytical category which describes,
more or less accurately, certain social relationships.  For Marxists,
the relationships in question are the most important for understanding
the ways in which societies are structured and how they might be
changed. For particular individuals, however, class is only one possible
way of identifying themselves; it may be less important than their
gender, ethnicity, sexuality, or their national, religious or cultural
affiliations. One's experience in the workplace may generate a certain
degree of class consciousness, but this need not be translated into a
broader political commitment. The first task of socialists is therefore
the organisation of people sharing a common economic relationship into a
cohesive political force. As Adam Przeworski explains: 'the division of
a society into classes does not necessarily result in the organisation
of politics in terms of class ... [This] is always a result of conflicts
in which multiple forces strive to maintain or to alter in various ways
the existing social relations.' [30] Thus, socialists need constantly to
demonstrate that class interests and class divisions are the most
salient features of capitalist societies, in order to organise workers
politically.

Of course, socialists do not, and cannot, relate directly to the working
class as such. It is never classes that engage directly in politics, but
organisations seeking to represent classes, sections of classes or -
alternatively - national, ethnic or religious groups (or, indeed, broad
coalitions of any of these). In the first instance, workers are
organised politically through trade unions, and workers' parties
generally base themselves on trade unions (or seek to do so).  This is
not the place to consider the histories of the various workers' parties
and the specific reasons for their successes or (more often) failures in
pursuing the interests of their social base. Instead, in the remainder
of this article, I want to consider the arguments of those on the left
who claim that the organised working class is no longer capable of
acting as the revolutionary subject - the agency of socialist change. 

The theoretical downgrading of the role of the working class, by several
influential socialist thinkers, became increasingly common from the late
1970s onward, reflecting the international offensive of the New Right
and the infliction of a series of major defeats on the labour movement.
The apparent inability of the working class to fulfil its supposed
revolutionary destiny or even to withstand the 'roll-back' of the social
gains it had won in the twentieth century, provoked two types of
theoretical revisionism. The more radical of these was typified by Andre
Gorz's _Farewell to the Working Class_ [31], which argued that the
working class has been too successfully incorporated into the structures
of capitalism to be able to free itself and overthrow the system. While
socialism remains desirable and, in principle, achievable, it must be
realised by alternative forces, characterised by their capacity to
extricate themselves from the capitalist labour process and establish
practical alternatives to capitalism on a small scale, prefiguring the
eventual new society. In contrast to this was a more defeatist analysis,
which developed out of the increasing accommodation of the Eurocommunist
parties with social-democratic reformism and reached its apogee with the
'New Times' project of _Marxism Today_ in the late 1980s. [32]  This
claimed that the project of replacing capitalism with socialism had
either missed its chance, or else had always been misconceived. Either
way, the idea of a unified emancipatory movement, based on the organised
working class, was at odds with an increasingly 'postmodern' world, in
which 'mass society', characterised by generalised class consciousness,
had been replaced by a plurality of competing and overlapping
identities. In place of a unified political struggle aimed at an
overarching objective, the left should embrace a range of popular and
democratic struggles - against racism, imperialism and patriarchy, for
peace, ecology and gay and lesbian liberation, etc. - none of which
should take precedence over any of the others. Moreover, each of these
could only be advanced by occupying and enlarging the democratic spaces
within bourgeois-democratic states; any direct challenge to capitalism
and the capitalist state was now unfeasible and probably undesirable.
[33]

This analysis proceeds, in part, from a legitimate criticism of much
twentieth century Marxism and socialism: its 'economism', which saw
struggles for gender and racial equality (for example) treated as
secondary to the overriding imperative of the class struggle. Following
the burgeoning of new social movements such as feminism in the 1960s,
however, most leading Marxist thinkers, and much of the organised far
left, accepted that they could not dictate to the 'specially oppressed'
in society the order of priority of the political struggles in which
they were engaged. Nevertheless, for most socialists, two considerations
continued to assign the class struggle a unique character. First, the
subordinate group in question accounts for the vast majority of
humanity, so that almost all of those enduring sexism and/or racism, if
they are of working age, are also being exploited as sellers of their
own labour-power. Second, capitalism is a form of society characterised
by structural inequalities, which takes advantage of particular weakness
to impose even more skewed economic relations. Such a society offers
little prospect of finally overcoming discrimination based on sex, race
or any other factor, whereas any socialism worthy of the name would be
founded on the absolute equality of all human beings. 

The Marxism Today school of thought, however, took the critique of
economism and the evident weakness of the socialist and workers'
movement and wove them into a new dogma that disavowed any possibility
of comprehensively abolishing capitalism. This was underpinned by a
socio-economic analysis of advanced capitalist societies, which
conflated significant societal changes and superficial fads, under the
rubric of 'post-Fordism'. Whereas the workers' movement was experienced
by many as an oppressive (white, male, authoritarian) force, the new
'post-Fordist' capitalism was supposedly flexible and inclusive,
accommodating an endless variety of cultures, lifestyles and
aspirations. In place of a concern with production and the labour
process, therefore, the 'New Times' post-Marxists shifted their
attention to the liberating potential of a new, intelligent consumerism,
which supported the proliferation of alternative lifestyles. But, while
the 'New Times' project accurately reflected contemporary trends in
metropolitan popular culture, it became increasingly clear that it
offered nothing in the way of left political strategy, other than to
legitimise social democracy's embrace of neo-liberal capitalism. 


ANTI-GLOBALISATION AND CLASS POLITICS

The recent flowering of the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements,
however, have seen a revival of a non-class-based conception of
political agency similar to that of André Gorz. Writers such as Naomi
Klein and, most recently, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have
championed the myriad popular groupings, currents and initiatives, from
the Zapatistas to anti-WTO protestors, which have moved into conflict
with global capital. Hardt and Negri, coming from within the Marxist
tradition, explicitly identify 'the multitude' as the new agent of
change, in place of the working class. [34] In the face of such radical
ferment, largely outside the workers' movement, it is understandable
that much of the anti-capitalist left sees little reason to wait for the
working class to take the lead in the struggle against capitalism. 

Why, then, is a political movement based on the working class still
necessary? First of all, only such a movement - one that starts from the
analysis of class relations - necessarily contains within it a critique
of capitalism as such, and demands its complete abolition. Only by
recognising that the purpose of the subjugation and exploitation of
people _as workers_ is the extraction of surplus value - the creation of
profit - can we understand that this is what drives the system. Of
course, there are other - non-class - grievances against capitalism
which are equally devastating. The most pressing concern of the green
movement, in particular, is the very real threat to the continuation of
life on this planet - a threat from which capitalists are no more immune
than workers. This is a concern about a specific contemporary effect of
capitalism, however, not necessarily about the system as such.
Conceivably, the governments and ruling classes of the world could be
forced by well-orchestrated campaigning and rational argument to adopt a
more responsible economic regime, thus averting any danger of imminent
environmental catastrophe, while leaving the relations of exploitation
fundamentally intact. For some green activists (although, in fairness,
probably not many) this state of affairs could be endured indefinitely,
their principal objective having been accomplished. An awareness,
however, that the motive force of capitalism is the imperative to
exploit and accumulate, regardless of the broader social and
environmental considerations, should lead one to expect that the kind of
irrationality that jeopardises life itself will continually recur as
long as the system exists. 

The same considerations apply to most of the issues around which the
anti-globalisation movement is organised: the 'super-exploitation' of
workers and farmers in the less developed countries; 'unfair'
international trade; the imposition of structural adjustment programmes;
repression of trade union and community activists; destruction of
indigenous cultures and economies; degradation of food and drink;
duplicitous and manipulative advertising and marketing, etc, etc. While,
collectively, these phenomena tell us a great deal about the character
of capitalism, none of them is more than a contingent feature of the
system, which could conceivably be eradicated while leaving the social
order fundamentally unchanged. Only the critique of capitalism as such
can identify the common origin of the many social evils that the system
throws up, and only the working class - the perennial victims of
capitalism, in all places and all periods of its existence - can bring
it to an end. Who is better placed than munitions workers to end the
manufacture of lethal armaments? Who could halt the despoliation of the
environment more easily than workers in the polluting industries
themselves? The anti-globalisation movement - and the many other radical
social movements which preceded it and which have coalesced within it -
have much to teach the labour movement, as well as offering a radical
zeal and new ways of organising and campaigning. But ultimately, if
capitalism is the problem, then the hegemony of the organised,
politically conscious working class will be a necessary part of the
solution.

But to recognise this brings us little closer to a viable strategy for
overcoming capitalism. A real challenge for the left is to reinvigorate
the workers' movement with the radicalism of the anti-globalisation
movement. Recent attempts by Marxists to address this have, however,
gone little further than acknowledging that it is desirable and a
expressing a voluntaristic determination to bring it about. Fausto
Bertinotti, for example, argues that what is needed is 'a radical
refoundation of politics as a worldwide process and thus a
reconstruction of the agency of change: a redefinition of the working
class. ... [This] means starting from the main resource available, which
is the movement against capitalist globalisation.' [35] This, however,
is hardly coherent: it pays lip service to the Marxist conception of
working class agency, while effectively seeking to establish a political
movement without a definite class base as a _substitute_ for the working
class. A little more concretely, Bertinotti suggests that we need 'to
build a link between the fight against globalisation and the fight
against insecurity and exploitation', although he does not suggest how
this might be accomplished (at least, not in the article cited).       

A major problem is the fact that, even within the organised labour
movement, there has for some time been little semblance of a class-based
conception of politics. The New Right has been very successful in
eradicating the language of class from mainstream public discourse, and
in this it has been greatly assisted by the ideological capitulation of
the leadership of social-democracy.  An important element of this is the
idea that, in advanced capitalist societies the working class, as
traditionally conceived, is no longer a cohesive social force, but has
been rendered obsolescent by growing social mobility and diversity,
allowing people to choose their own identity and lifestyle (part of the
_Marxism Today_/'New Times' thesis). The more voluntaristic elements of
the far left assert that this is simply a fiction perpetuated by a
treacherous political leadership, which may be stripped away to reveal
and express the continuing reality of capitalist class relations, and
thereby advance the class struggle. They rightly point out that, while
heavy manufacturing industry has declined (at least in the advanced
capitalist countries), the proletarian conditions of alienation,
immiseration and exploitation have been reproduced in the newer service
industries - an oft-cited example being the rapid growth of call
centres. Building a class-conscious political movement on this basis is
not so easy, however. One germ of truth in the 'New Times' thesis is the
argument that the decline of heavy industry has had a destructive impact
on the cohesion of the working class. The social infrastructure of the
class - whole communities (housing, amenities, social clubs) built
around factories and mines - has been irreparably fractured. Thus, while
today's low-paid, unskilled 'service' employees meet the criteria for
working class membership (as elaborated by writers like Erik Olin
Wright) just as much as the miners or factory workers of the twentieth
century, they tend to exist in a more atomised world, without the
support networks of their social forebears.  Moreover, they are much
less likely to belong to a trade union. They cannot, therefore, be
assumed to represent a reserve of latent class militancy, just waiting
for the right leadership. 

The process of class formation - whereby the disparate agents who occupy
working class locations in the class structure are constituted as a
conscious political force - will therefore require patient work by
socialists and trade union militants. The primary focus for the left
will inevitably be the comparatively small proportion of wage-earners
who are already unionised. These, however, include significant strata -
such as civil servants and local government staff with managerial or
supervisory responsibilities - those who, in Wright's terminology,
occupy 'contradictory class locations'. It is essential to recognise
that, in such cases, there is likely to be a degree of ambivalence about
their class allegiances. They are more likely to think and act like
workers when their jobs are threatened or their employers are trying to
hold their wages down, than when they are in line for promotion. When
circumstances bring class struggle to the fore, the cogency of socialist
analysis is obviously more likely to be apparent, but even then, left
activists cannot rely on clichéd rhetorical appeals to a homogeneous
conception of 'the workers'. Socialist politics has to relate to the way
working people actually think about themselves, their jobs and the wider
world. We have to recognise that, while the alienating conditions of
most employment under capitalism may well engender a degree of class
consciousness and a desire for change, such instincts are less likely to
be sustained in the absence of a readily available socialist worldview.
The weakness of any consistent challenge to the prevailing neo-liberal
ideology in recent years has left large sections of the working
population resigned to the inevitability of an unrewarding, unfulfilling
working life, seeking consolation in leisure time, holidays, personal
relationships and the availability of consumer goods. For those with
better pay and prospects, diligence and obedience may offer a future of
relative affluence. To tell them that this is against their 'real'
interests, which actually lie in a hypothetical future socialist
society, might not seem very plausible.

The task ahead, then, is formidable. A modest upturn in industrial
action, and the election of left leaderships in a few unions do not mean
that the entire working population is seething with militancy. Yet the
very nature of capitalism means that it will continually create
conditions that make working people receptive to the arguments of
socialists. The imperative to accumulate - to boost profits, drive down
labour costs, cut back, slim down, become 'leaner' and more competitive
- means that few jobs are really secure in the long term. We could all
be waiting a long time for a cataclysmic economic crisis, but pressures
and dysfunctions on a smaller scale are rarely far away. The socialist
left needs to find ways of making sense of all this, and arguing for a
feasible alternative, in a way that avoids both dogmatism and
opportunism. We have to put the labour process at the centre of
political analysis, and not just defensively - trying to curb employers'
worst excesses - but by raising the questions of power and control at
work. In this, we can certainly benefit from some of the insights about
the horrors of the system that have been popularised by the
anti-globalisation movement. One thing is certain: as long as capitalism
reproduces class relations, class politics will remain not just
relevant, but essential.


NOTES

1 This has certainly been the case since Arthur Scargill's decision, in
1995, to establish the Socialist Labour Party; a lower-key discussion
had accompanied Militant's decision to exit the Labour Party three years
earlier. Of course, similar discussions had taken place periodically
since the 1920s. 

2 See, for example, the article by Fausto Bertinotti, national secretary
of Italy's Rifondazione Comunista: 'Reformist social democracy is no
longer on the agenda', _The Guardian_, 11 August 2003. 

3 K. Marx, _Early Writings_ (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1975), p. 423.

4 See Capital vol. 1, chapter 25: 'The General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation'. Many critics have pointed out that the absolute living
standards of the working class, at least in the advanced capitalist
countries, have generally improved since Capital was written. A careful
reading, however, suggests that Marx saw immiseration only as a
relative, rather than an absolute process: '...in proportion as capital
accumulates, the situation of the worker, _be his payment high or low_,
must grow worse.' (p.799 of the 1976 Pelican/NLR edition, my
emphasis).While the material conditions of the working class have
remained stable, and even improved somewhat, they have consistently been
excluded from the benefits of the wealth produced by capital
accumulation - the gap between rich and poor has increased. On this, see
Ernest Mandel's introduction to the edition cited, pp. 66-73, and Harry
Braverman's 1958 article, 'Marx in the Modern World', available on the
internet at
<http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/AmerSoc_5805.htm>.
  
5 This is a very brief and schematic sketch of the rich and complex
argument set out by Marx in volume 1 of _Capital_. The labour theory of
value has, of course, been criticised on a number of counts, not only by
bourgeois economists but by many sympathetic to Marx, and some of these
criticisms warrant serious consideration. Needless to say, this article
is not the place to assess such criticisms (nor, indeed, am I
particularly well-qualified to conduct such an assessment). For our
present purposes, however, it is enough to note that the basic gist of
Marx's account of exploitation is accepted - at least in qualitative
terms - by almost all those in the Marxist tradition. 

6 The intensification of this 'de-skilling' process is the theme of
Harry Braverman's classic _Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation
of Work in the Twentieth Century_ (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1974).

7 K. Marx & F. Engels, _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_ in K.
Marx, _The Revolutions of 1848_ (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973), p.78.

8 K. Marx, _Capital_, vol. III (ed. F. Engels. London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1974 [1894]), p. 886.

9 K. Marx & F. Engels, op. cit., p. 67.

10 H. Braverman, op. cit., pp. 238-40, p. 295.

11 Office for National Statistics, _Labour Market Statistics_ (August
2004), table 5, <http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/lmsuk0804.pdf>; K.
Roberts, Class in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).

12 R. Went, _Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses_
(London: Pluto Press/IIRE, 2000), p. 17.

13 P. Armstrong, A. Glyn & K. Harrison, _Capitalism Since 1945_ (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1991), p. 289.

14 D. Filmer, 'Estimating the World at Work', background paper for
_World Development Report 1995_ (Washington DC: World Bank, 1995)
<http://econ.worldbank.org/files/846_wps1488.pdf>. 'Industry' here
covers 'mining and quarrying, manufacturing, gas, electricity and water,
and construction.' The figures quoted are not entirely mutually
exclusive since one East Asian country (Japan) and one Latin American
country (Mexico) also belonged to the OECD at the time that the report
was produced (South Korea has joined subsequently).

15 Office for National Statistics, 'Socio-economic classification of
working-age population, summer 2003', _Regional Trends_ 38,
<http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Expodata/Spreadsheets/D7665.xls>.

16 The organised far left is particularly guilty of neglecting these
issues. For example: in a recent issue of _Socialist Worker_, Kevin
Ovenden devotes an entire column to explaining 'what is special about
the working class', without ever defining who the working class are
('The power that is able to transform the world', _Socialist Worker_, 29
November 2003). Even an in-depth article about class by the SWP's
leading theoretician, Chris Harman, which does seek to identify the
working class, does not give an explicit rationale for Harman's chosen
definition, but rather takes it as read that it is methodologically
correct ('The Workers of the World', _International Socialism_ 96,
Autumn 2002).  

17 This typology comes from E.O. Wright, _Classes_ (London: Verso
Classics, 1997 [1985]), pp. 37-42.

18 A. Hunt, 'Theory and Politics in the Identification of the Working
Class' in A. Hunt (ed) _Class and Class Structure_ (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1977).

19 H. Braverman, op cit. See especially chapters 15 & 18.

20 This originally appeared in the journal, _Radical America_, in 1977
and was subsequently reprinted, along with a number of responses by
other US Marxists, in P. Walker (ed), _Between Labour and Capital_
(Hassocks: Harvester, 1979). 

21 Ibid, p.12.

22 For example, Chris Harman glibly refers to 'the new middle class who
get paid more value than they create in return for helping to control
the mass of workers' - a characterisation that begs more questions than
it answers (C. Harman, op. cit.).

23 See N. Poulantzas, _Classes in Contemporary Capitalism_ (London: NLB,
1975), introduction and part three.

24 E.O. Wright, 'Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies' _New
Left Review_ 98 (Jul-Aug 1976) (reprinted in his _Class, Crisis and the
State_ (London: NLB, 1978). See also G. Carchedi, _On the Economic
Identification of Social Classes_ (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977)
and several of the essays in A. Hunt (ed.), op. cit., which also
contains a response by Poulantzas to his critics.

25 Wright also points out that Poulantzas' view has little basis in
Marx, who remarks in one passage in _Capital_ that a private
schoolteacher is as much a producer of surplus value as a worker in a
sausage factory (Wright, 'Class Boundaries', p.15).  

26 G. Carchedi, op cit., especially chapter 1.

27 See E.O. Wright, _Classes_. Roemer's ideas are set out in _A General
Theory of Exploitation and Class_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1982). For a short summary, see 'New directions in the theory of
class', in J. Roemer (ed), _Analytical Marxism_ (Cambridge: CUP, 1986).

28 Wright, _Classes_, pp.194-95.

29 'Socio-economic classification of working-age population, summer
2003', _Regional Trends_ 38,
<http://www.statistics.gov.uk/StatBase/Expodata/Spreadsheets/D7665.xls>.
'Routine' and 'semi-routine' occupations together account for 23.1 per
cent; the long-term unemployed account for a further 16.5 per cent;
lower technical and supervisory occupations make up 9.4 per cent and
'intermediate' occupations (which 'do not usually any exercise of
authority') add a further 10.3 per cent. See _The National Statistics
Socio-Economic Classification User Manual_ (London: ONS, April 2002).
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/methods_quality/ns_sec/downloads/NS-SEC-USER-VER1-2.pdf.

30 A. Przeworski, _Capitalism and Social Democracy_ (Cambridge: CUP,
1986), pp. 100-101.

31 A. Gorz, _Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial
Socialism_ (London: Pluto Press, 1982).

32 S. Hall & M. Jacques (eds), _New Times: The Changing Face of Politics
in the 1990s_ (Lawrence & Wishart, 1989) contains a representative
collection of essays. See especially those by Dick Hebdige, John Urry,
Charlie Leadbeater and Frank Mort.

33 I am not dismissing the validity of such strategies if they are based
on a perspective of working 'in and against the state', recognising that
the capitalist state must ultimately be transcended. The problem with
most of the _Marxism Today_ writers was that their affiliation to
'popular-democratic' struggles eventually lost its transformative edge,
leaving them with an essentially liberal view of the capitalist state as
neutral arbiter between competing social forces. 

34 M. Hardt & A. Negri, _Empire_ (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2001). The journal, _Historical Materialism_, has published a
number of responses to this work, spread over several recent issues.

35 F. Bertinotti, op. cit.

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