[Marxism] Class structure and class politics (II)

[Ed George <edgeorge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

WHO MAKES UP THE WORKING CLASS?

Rather surprisingly, given its centrality in their political ideas, Marx
and Engels never systematically set out their conception of class. The
only place where Marx began to do so was in volume 3 of _Capital_, where
he refers to wage-labourers, capitalists and landlords as 'the three
great social classes' and poses the question of what gives them this
character. He considers that it might be because in each case, the
members of the class derive their revenue from a common source, but then
points out that this would make physicians and officials separate
classes as well. Engels then tells us that the manuscript breaks off,
without the question having been resolved. [8]

Where Marx and Engels discuss class in more theoretical terms (as
opposed to commenting on concrete developments) they generally
concentrate on the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, who are introduced
in _The Communist Manifesto_ as the 'two great classes directly facing
each other' in 'our epoch'. In a footnote written in 1888, Engels
explains:

'By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the
means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat,
the class of modern wage labourers, who having no means of production of
their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live.'
[9]

This certainly establishes wage labour as a necessary criterion for
membership of the proletariat but it is doubtful that Marx and Engels
saw it as a sufficient criterion, considering their references elsewhere
in the Manifesto to intermediate strata such as 'the lower middle class,
the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant', none
of which are regarded as part of the bourgeoisie proper, and at least
some of whom would be reduced to selling their labour power. In
_Capital_, Marx focuses his attention on manufacturing and extractive
industries, since his purpose is to explain the creation of exchange
value and surplus value, and the examples he gives are therefore of
workers in these industries. This presents an 'ideal type' of
proletarian but consigns other categories of wage-earner to an
analytical grey area.

The _Manifesto_ and _Capital_ both suggest, however, that history might
resolve this ambiguity: capitalism is simplifying class antagonisms and
bourgeois society is increasingly being polarised between the 'two great
classes', as intermediate strata are rendered obsolete by the processes
of historical development. While capitalism has certainly transformed
social and occupational structures in the last century or so, however,
it has left us with, if anything, a more complex pattern of
stratification. In the advanced capitalist countries, the proletarian
occupations characteristic of Marx's time - manual workers in
manufacturing and extractive industries - have declined as a proportion
of the total workforce. For the USA, Harry Braverman shows that, workers
in such 'goods producing' industries steeply declined as a proportion of
all non-agricultural workers after 1950. Moreover, even within such
industries, the ratio of administrative to productive employees
increased from 7.7 per cent in 1899 to 21.6 per cent in 1947. The
proportion of the employed labour force in clerical jobs increased from
0.6 per cent to almost 18 per cent in the USA between 1870 and 1970, and
in Britain from 0.8 per cent to almost 13 per cent between 1851 and
1961. [10]  Manufacturing, construction, energy and water together
account for less than 20 per cent of the employed British population
today, compared to around 50 per cent throughout the century leading up
to the 1970s. [11]  Braverman describes some of the reasons for this:
the mechanisation and automation of manufacturing processes, which mean
that fewer workers are required to produce a given quantity of goods;
and conversely the concentration and centralisation of capital, creating
giant corporations with specialised marketing, administrative and
personnel departments.

Another important factor, however, has been the growing international
division of labour, as West European, North American and Japanese
capital is exported to less developed countries (LDCs) in search of
cheaper labour (as well as markets and raw materials). Robert Went cites
the example of Nike, none of whose 9000 employees at its Oregon
headquarters is involved in production, which is instead subcontracted
to independent companies in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and
China, altogether accounting for some 75,000 jobs. [12] As heavy
industry declines in the advanced capitalist countries, it is
reconstituted in newly industrialised countries like South Korea and
Taiwan: for example, the share of manufactures in the LDCs' exports
increased from less than a fifth in 1965 to almost 60 per cent in 1987.
[13] While, therefore, the kind of proletarians that Marx and Engels had
in mind may now be fewer in number in Britain or Germany than they might
have expected, the global proletariat is still rapidly expanding.  Thus,
a 1995 World Bank report estimated that there were 101,938,000 people
employed in industry in the advanced capitalist countries of the OECD,
but 168,275,000 in East Asia and the Pacific and a further 39,904,000 in
Latin America and the Caribbean. [14]

Nevertheless, for socialists in the advanced capitalist countries, there
is still the question of the new intermediate strata, commonly referred
to as 'the new middle class'. To put this in perspective: current
official figures for the British state working-age population place 10.8
per cent in 'higher managerial and professional occupations', 22.2 per
cent in 'lower managerial and professional occupations' and 10.3 per
cent on 'intermediate occupations'. [15]  This presents Marxists with a
complex set of problems, with which theoreticians have grappled for the
last thirty years, but which activists rarely acknowledge. [16] Yet
these problems have real practical relevance: how can socialists expect
to lead the working class in its historic mission if we are not even
sure who is part of the working class? Moreover, Marx and Engels
referred repeatedly to the proletariat as the 'immense majority' and saw
this as crucial to its ability to carry out a successful socialist
revolution. If the working class is barely a majority - or is even a
minority - then the odds against it are somewhat greater. Not only does
it face the hostility of the capitalist class and all those institutions
that reinforce its social control; it also faces the prospect of
significant forces among the subordinate social strata which may, at
best, be unconvinced and, at worst, actively hostile to the socialist
cause. It is therefore essential to understand how non-proletarian
strata fit into the big picture. Is there really a separate middle class
or classes? And if so, are its interests closer to those of the working
class, or the bourgeoisie? How far is it susceptible to the appeal of
socialist politics? Can it be incorporated into an alliance for
socialism?

There are four basic approaches that have been taken by Marxist
theoreticians. One is to say that bourgeois society really is polarised
between bourgeoisie and proletariat, and that members of any so-called
'middle class' actually belong in one of these two classes (in most
cases, the working class). Another is to say that a 'new middle class'
does exist, and is a consequence of the complex division of labour in
modern capitalism, which creates new occupations that are essential to
the maintenance of the economy and society. A third approach is to treat
it as a new manifestation of the petty bourgeoisie. The final position
holds that middle strata exist which are neither bourgeoisie nor
proletariat, but which do not constitute a separate class or classes in
their own right; rather they combine aspects of the two main classes.
[17]

The first type of argument is one often favoured in practice by the
organised far left, perhaps because it is simplest conceptually: there
is only one significant dividing line in capitalist societies, that
which separates those who own and control the means of production (the
bourgeoisie) and those who do not, and who therefore have to sell their
labour-power for a wage (the working class). Even allowing for the fact
that top corporate executives may safely be placed in the bourgeoisie,
because they exercise real economic ownership of the means of
production, even if they are not the legal owners, this still leaves the
vast bulk of the working population in the working class.  Such a broad
definition would include significant strata whose earnings, level of
authority and degree of employment security mean that they have very
little in common with, say, a factory operative, a sales assistant or a
junior clerical officer.  Moreover, in many cases they would themselves
consider it laughable to be regarded as working class. Of course, this
could be put down to 'false consciousness' - the obscuring by bourgeois
ideology of 'real' economic relations, but this hardly seems adequate to
justify the idea that, say, judges, chief constables, vice-chancellors
or senior corporate managers (to take admittedly extreme examples) are
part of the working class. The fact is that there are substantial
numbers of wage (or, rather, _salary_) - earners in advanced capitalist
societies who derive considerable material benefit from the status quo,
and it is just not credible to suggest that they are 'essentially' the
same as any other 'worker'. (Such an argument also has little basis in
the writings of Marx and Engels, whose frequent references to 'the
middle classes' should dispel any notion that they considered all
wage-earners to be proletarians.)

A more sophisticated variation on the simple two-class model has been
put forward by Alan Hunt, who argues that all those who are compelled to
sell their labour-power are potential members of the working class; the
actual membership of the class is determined by class struggle. [18]  A
similar position is taken by Harry Braverman in his classic study of the
labour process, _Labor and Monopoly Capital_. Braverman argues that the
compulsion to sell one's labour-power represents a sufficient formal
criterion for membership of the working class but that the practical
saliency of this will vary. At a time when the vast majority of the
population have been separated from ownership of the means of
production, those selling their labour power include relatively
privileged strata of managers, engineers, etc. whose comparative
affluence and degree of control over their own labour, and that of
others, mean that they do not share the experience of those who are
'unmistakably' part of the working class. However, Braverman argues,
class is dynamic, not static and needs to be seen as a process. The
tendency throughout the twentieth century has been for white collar work
to be proletarianised and there are indications that many more groups of
relatively privileged wage-earners are succumbing to this process. [19]
While this argument seems persuasive when it relates to low-paid
clerical workers increasingly being treated, and identifying themselves,
as part of the working class, it is less plausible when one considers
the relative situations of, say, an unskilled production-line worker and
a manager in the same factory. Neither Braverman nor Hunt would consider
there to be any fundamental class difference between the two, yet their
respective positions in production relations are clearly very different.
The fact that the manager may find his or her job downgraded at some
time in the future does not make that difference any less real.

The second type of argument, that there does in fact exist a distinct
middle class between bourgeoisie and proletariat, has been presented in
various forms by a number of writers, but perhaps most persuasively by
Barbara and John Ehrenreich, in their essay, 'The
Professional-Managerial Class'. [20] The Ehrenreichs define this class -
the 'PMC', for short - 'as consisting of salaried mental workers who do
not own the means of production and whose major function in the social
division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of
capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.' [21] Thus it
includes 'cultural workers, managers, engineers and scientists, etc.'
Its emergence is a response to the need for specialised occupations to
reproduce the structures of capitalist society, and presupposes the
existence of a sufficiently large social surplus to support it, in
addition to the bourgeoisie. While the work of the PMC objectively
serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, it has a distinct ideology of
its own, which is essentially technocratic and which sometimes takes an
anti-capitalist form.  The argument contains some important insights,
but it ultimately seems unconvincing to argue that the many disparate
types of occupation involved share a common class interest. University
lecturers, social workers, doctors, journalists, civil servants and
managers in capitalist firms (to mention some of the 'PMC' occupations
cited by the Ehrenreichs) encompass vast differences in terms of their
roles in social and economic activity, the degree of power they exercise
over others and the rewards they receive. Some, indeed, are involved in
the production process (albeit not as the direct producers), while
others are completely marginal to production. Nevertheless, the 'PMC'
thesis is better thought-out than many other versions of the 'new middle
class' approach. [22]

The 'new petty bourgeoisie' argument was favoured by Nicos Poulantzas,
who pioneered the serious theoretical discussion of class among Marxists
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Poulantzas argues that the economic
boundary of the working class is set by the distinction between
productive labour - which he defines very specifically as labour
creating value through the production of tangible goods, as opposed to
services - and unproductive labour. [23] He goes on to argue, however,
that even some productive wage-earners should be excluded from the
working class: those who perform a supervisory function - since they are
dominating the workers on behalf of capital - as well as scientists,
technicians and others who perform principally mental rather than manual
labour, since this also accords them a socially dominant position by
giving them 'secret knowledge' of the production process. All of the
residual strata of wage-earners who are non-productive, non-manual
and/or supervisory, Poulantzas classifies as the 'new petty
bourgeoisie'. While, as he admits, these non-working-class wage-earners
are economically very different from the traditional petty bourgeoisie
(shopkeepers and self-employed artisans), Poulantzas gives a political
and ideological justification for placing both within the same class:
both the 'traditional' and the 'new' petty bourgeoisies have a
fundamentally individualistic ideological tendencies, and neither has a
consistent political programme of its own, but instead vacillates
between those of the bourgeoisie and the working class.

Poulantzas' arguments have been widely criticised, on a number of
grounds - most persuasively, in my view, by the US Marxist, Erik Olin
Wright [24]. Wright argues that Poulantzas' definition of productive
labour is too narrow (since non-material goods sold on the market also
represent exchange value and surplus value  [25]); that he takes no
account of the fact that most jobs involve both productive and
non-productive aspects; and - most importantly - that there is no reason
to suppose that productive and unproductive workers have fundamentally
different interests, since both are exploited by the capitalist. Wright
further challenges the legitimacy of assigning the 'traditional' and
'new' petty bourgeoisies to a common class on the basis of ideological,
rather than economic criteria, and questions whether they share much
ideological common ground in any case (for example: the traditional
petty bourgeoisie tends to be hostile to the state, whereas a
significant section of the 'new petty bourgeoisie' is made up of state
employees). Wright also analyses statistical data on the US labour
force, using Poulantzas' categories and finds that less than 20 per cent
of the labour force would be considered part of the working class.

Wright's own view is that the so-called 'new middle class' is not a
cohesive class in its own right, but a series of strata comprising
locations that combine elements of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
These locations have objectively contradictory interests, inasmuch as
they are comparatively privileged in relation to the working class but
are subordinate to, and exploited by, the bourgeoisie. According to
Wright's original version of this thesis, a particular location may be
nearer the bourgeoisie or the proletariat, depending on the extent to
which it which it exercises control over investments and the
accumulation process; the physical means of production; and the labour
power of others. According to these criteria, for example, senior
managers would have more in common with the bourgeoisie, and foremen or
line supervisors more in common with the proletariat. The Italian
Marxist, Guglielmo Carchedi, taking a somewhat different theoretical
approach from Wright's, nevertheless comes to similar conclusions,
arguing that some wage-earners have 'ambiguous' class positions,
performing both 'the function of the collective worker' and 'the
function of global capital'. [26]

Wright has subsequently set out a second version of his theory of
contradictory class locations, following his rejection of the orthodox
Marxian labour theory of value in favour of a new theory of exploitation
developed by John Roemer. [27] According to this version, the principal
form of exploitation under capitalism, based on ownership/non-ownership
of the means of production, is supplemented by secondary forms of
exploitation, based on ownership/non-ownership of, respectively,
'organisation assets' and 'skills/credentials'. The bourgeoisie possess
all three, the working class none, and those occupying contradictory
class locations possess some but not others. Exploitation constitutes
the capacity to compel others to labour on one's behalf - to benefit
from the surplus labour time performed by workers who do not possess the
same assets as oneself.

As is no doubt clear from the above summary, these are complex
arguments, and there is insufficient space in an article like this to do
them justice. To my mind, Wright's arguments (and those of Carchedi) are
compelling in their attempts to capture the complexity of class
relations in advanced capitalist societies. The more recent version of
Wright's theory certainly represents a significant departure from
orthodox Marxism in suggesting that many wage-earners, who are exploited
in one respect, may also be exploiters in another, but it is worthy of
serious consideration. In any case, both versions of his theory produce
similar results, in terms of where they draw the main class boundaries.
The main practical difference is the introduction in the newer version
of 'credentials' as a factor excluding some locations from the working
class (reflecting the greater influence of the ideas of Max Weber on
Wright at this stage). When Wright attempted to 'operationalise' his
theory through empirical research, in the form of extensive surveys of
samples of the US and Swedish workforces, he found that in both
countries, the working class represented around 40 per cent of the
labour force, although a clear majority - 60 per cent - could be created
if the 'contradictory locations with marginal control over organisation
or skill assets' were added [28]. Interestingly, very similar figures
can be arrived at by adding up the nearest equivalent categories in the
official socio-economic classification of the British-state working
population, the theory behind which is largely based on the work of the
Weberian sociologist, John Goldthorpe [29].

Wright's revised theory, in all its conceptual complexity, could
certainly not easily be adopted by activists as a practical tool for
engaging in class politics.  To a large extent, however, this simply
reflects the fact that social reality is inconveniently messy. What
should be clear from the whole debate is the difficulty of trying to
establish the class character of large sections of advanced capitalist
societies in an analytically robust way.  This is not merely a question
of placing people in the 'correct' pigeon-holes. Of course, social
formations are dynamic, not static. The processes of capitalist
development, and the struggles to which they give rise, constantly
re-draw class lines. But, unless we abandon any determinant role for the
economy, we must accept that the scope for such alignments and
realignments is circumscribed by the respective locations of particular
agents in the class structure.  Of all those who are neither part of the
bourgeoisie nor 'unmistakably' part of the working class, some are
clearly more likely to identify with the working class than others. We
need to have some idea of what are the determining factors behind this
and, whether or not we fully accept his conclusions, Wright's analysis
helps to identify these factors.

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