Against racism and fundamentalism For the right to dissent are monolithis, and the attempt to the sanctimonious claims, made in the context of increasing censorship and widespread racial discrimination, that British society somehow embodies the values of @ the racist assumption that Muslim and black communities identify Islam as a whole with fun- damentalists to control dissent and communities, in particular theirat- pluralism and the right to dissent; D the use of the book by fun- repress diversity within their own damentalism and terrorism: REED EOE PHOTO: AM ONLY SUITABLE talists; it was scarcely noticed by the medin. However Women against Fundamentalism wos launched as a network which secks to challenge Coverage in the June edition of Spare Rib looks not only at the growth of islamic fundamca- separatism, at the role of the Bible-thumpers of the anti-abortion movement, and of Jewish fun- damentalism in Israel's campaign against the The Islamic Fundamentalists have portrayed lim community in Britain — and it is no surprise to Arian women who have been organising for some time on a secular basis that the organisers of the unti-Kuslidie demonstration explicitly stated that they did not want women and the rise of fundamentalism in all religions. talism but at the development of Sikh themscives ar the spokesmen (sic) of the Mus- SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 16 June 1989 or civil liberties bodies to have come together to voice We support Rushdie's right to publish his book and we reject the attempts of both fundamentalists inviting any and all labour sign the following statement. "We are a number of diverse individuals and groups whe fundamentalism which have Rushdie's book The Satanic: and racists to use this affair to There has been much talk of • the use of this affair to mount movement, women's, black Rushdie's book giving offence. Voices for Salman Rushdie is our concern about the issues of censorship, racism, and arisen around Salman racial attacks on the Muslim com- promole their own ends. children to participate! We are offended by: munity in Britain; Verses. intifada.
beneath the surface ofapparent changes which have been discarded along with clogs, shawin many are cager to embrace as the dawn of a new era where class distinctions - and conflict - Does working a computer for wages make her middle class or working class? closer look beneath the and cloth caps. Unemployment, together with the the decimation of traditional industries and the growth of the service sector, has changed the face of working class occupations. Less people are now employed in the heavy industrial blue Ten years of change - What is the working CLASS OF As Thatcher enters her eleventh year of office and the left scrambles over Itself In the race to pronounce the working class and class struggle outmoded, Jean Reilly and Jane Wells dust off the old definitions and find the soft left's analysis, and not the Class divisions in Britain are now a ASIC S class? '89 working class, lacking.
- essentially materialist - approach. Because it examinesthe "objective", or the real roots of the Capitalist society, according to Marx, is Marxism offers a more subtle and analytical problem and not just its "subjective ap- built on the division of people into groups - classes - according lo their place in their The bourgeoisie, or ruling class, owns the economy and their relationship to production. pearance, if can stand the test of time. collar jobs (factories, production lines, mines) An estimated 20 percent of adults now own shares, and more than a million council homes have heen bought since Thatcher came to power. Standards of living have gone up for many households. The 'average worker' who has voted Thatcher in at the last three clections traditionally identified in popular under- is now, we are told (before the recent increase in inflation and mortgate rates), better off. standing as working class jobs. thing of the past, according to Conser- Baker, speaking in a interview for Hugo Young's recent television review of the you and you can't tell what class people have.', he said. This was, he added, one of the great successes of the Thatcher revolution' - brought about by council vative Education Secretary Kenneth "Thatcher Years'. 'You look around are any more. Ten years ago you could house and share sales (with, presumab-
means of production (factories, banks, com- panies). Ir Lives offincome-the "surplus value? (its profits, share dividends and sales) - that it Then there's the petty bourgeuisic; people who own their on micans of production (a shop, taxi or small business, for example), but who don't employ and therefore exploit other workers. Seif employed professionals (eg doc- legiances are weaker, but ultimately with the tors) also come into this category. Their al- extracts from the working class. When you apply the common sense critera sociologists and pollsters) - categories of housing tenure - then the "working class", so for assessing class (elevated into a science by "status, income/jobs, or, failing that, status of It's not surprising then than some (even some who claim to be Marxists) argue that the sum lotal of all these changes has seen off the Farewell to the working defined, starts to score lower. class? It's not surprising Many on the left seem to agree with him. We more (a handy formulation too, for a Labour ly, some help from Next and Marks and are all, goes the new conventional wisdom (readily embraced by Labour's leaders too). more middle class now. Like Ron Todd's hypothetical docker caming #400 with a villa in Marbella, we no longer need rescuing from an oppression that isn't supposed to exist any leadership with no intention of rescuing us —or Spencer).
relationship of these major groups in society, capitalist system — as long as it allows then to fourish. The growth of this class has heen a The definition of class, then, comes from the merely occupation or income, lifestyle or place SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 16 June 1989 rather than being a static category defined hy The working class - most of the rest ofes marked feature of the last decade. sells its lahour power. But does a decade of Thatcher add up to a fundamental restructuring in British society? And does it all demand a re think of what we mean hy class, or a roassessment of the actual and political weight of the working class and its Mauxists will want to take a closer look working class itself. Ten years of Thatcher have undoubtedly stamped their mark on the working class, with patterns of employment and unemployment. the jobs people have lost and the jobs they do. working conditions and standards of living all changing - and in some cases radically. the dockers — anyway). Page 26
relationship to the means of produc-. tion. Most white-collar workers are proletariat since they have no con- trol over their own, or others" labour. But there is a significant, if smaller layer who, although they don't own the means of production. They may even have control over investment in and resourcing of Where a worker, say, manages a budget and department in local ambiguous, or contradictory fully paid up members of the may control production or the labour power of a group of workers. production. - + attempts to extract more surplus value wage labour is the class struggle. Class dy academies, or the class consciousnes The working class is not so uniform a fict and struggle berween capital and Class is also objoctive' - out there in the That relationship, between the bour- geoisie and the working class, is neces- sarily anlagonistic, as capital inevitably from the working class foritself. The con- and conflict are necessarily connected. real world whether it is perceived as such or not - and not subjective" (ic depend- ent on the analytical abilities of some tren- But it isn't quite that simple, or crude. in the pecking order,
plements company business plans (or hospital cuts and closures) - or is even perhaps a bond dealer with no substantial sharcholdings of tory position as workers is clear, not just because of the day to day con tent of their work, but hecause of their relationship to the productive process. As well as selling their wage labour, they control others" labour, they control: (part of the productive process and they control There have always heen sections of the working class, who, because of their particular relationship to the process of production, have bers and importance in the working class as a years. They are materially affected by their role in production and the economy. This will affect their attitudes and politics - perhaps even their So, if the changes to the economy since 1979 haven'tscen off the working class as such, have they even fundamentally changed working class attitudes - to the point where Labour (with radical or even not so radical policies) is now unclectabic? Is the British clectorate now Working class people are subject to (and fory pressures, many of them economic (for ex- ample baving a stake in the profitability of ship) or ideological (patriotic allegiance to an it is an apparently expanding layer of ter off working class with a poor level of class consciousness which have led the soft left to It's handy though to remember that the predicting the 'embourgeoisment" of the work- Labour Iost three elections in a row, too, and the nation was told "you've never had it so govemment, oversees a factory production line, or draws up and im- her/his own - then their contradic- occupied such a contradictory class position. The type of jobs they do, and their relative num- whole may have changed over the last ten may sometimes actively seck out) contradic- capitalism. through property or share owner- imperialist power, or buying The Sun, for ex- workers expused to such pressures, and the het- revisionists have been pontificating and ing class since the 1950's and 60's (when perception of class - but not their class itself. investment/resource allocation. Have working class attitudes changed? more Thatcherite in its values? Desperate in the DHSS: Thatcherism has widened the working class at a stroke down to just 20 per services - public and private) which are of sprcad of employment with women and black workers forced into traditionally lower paid, low status 'servicing" jobs, such an approach very casily too separates women and black This is the mistake of the Marxism Today current and the wider, sociologically-inclined analysis prevalent in the traditionally a-histori- One of the soft left's favourite theorisers, the late Nicos Poulantzas, fell into this trap and identifies all non-productive labour as con- stituting a 'new-petty bourgeoisie'. Applying this defenition it would be possible chop the US cent of the American population, leaving this newly defined "new petty bourgeoisie" with 70 The ruling class can live happily with this formulation - since rejection of class struggle follows from a rejection of class. And the promotion of cross-class (and anti-working class) alliances then becomes an obvious alter- Where does all this leave 'new working class workers - those, often in white collar jobs in new or newly expanding expanding, usually dustrial production, finance, hanking. leisure, growing importance in the European economy? proletariat. Although sociologically speaking they may be 'middle class" (defined as a set of nons, lifestyles and attitudes), this in no way But many workers are, undoubtedly, in an percent -including. for example, refuse collec- service sector industries (eg high-tec light in- A Marxist analysis puts them with the cal and anti-theory British Labour movement. people into the category of "not real workers". What about the workers? makes them part of the pelly bourgeoisie. gulf between rich and poor tors and hospital porters. native political method. example. Today, where surplus value supports Emest Mandel, writing in his introduction to to purchase the means of livelihood without more or less continuous sale of labour power, In Marx's day this category of workers would have comprised servants and a small number of charity and state administrators, for the welfare state and a whole range of staffed state functions, as well as the private service panding section of the workforce - and might include everyone from teachers to school meals secretaries in local government to refuse collec- tors employed by private contractors. Like "productive' workers, all sell their wage labour, although they might not create surpius value as such themselves. All are denied control over their labour-process. And all stand to gain a volume of Mark's Capital, explained that "the proletariat in Marx's analysis of capitalism is the socio-economic compulsion to sell one's labour power. Included in the proletariat, then, are not only manual industrial workers, but all unproductive wage-labourers who are subject to the same fundamantal constraints: non- ownership of the means of production; lack of direct access to means of livelihood: inability IF we don't understand or accept both as pair of the proletariat, then it is easy to see non- productive workers as a different class (perhaps petty bourgeois) or, when they are expanding as a section of the workforce, as a new class with different interest from the proletariat. When they are growing at the current rate, panic sets in and the decline of the working clans is conflated with the decline of heavy industrial production. And because of the sex and race sector, "unproductive workers" are an ever-ex- staff (still) employed by the state, from defining structural characterisation of the frcedom from exploitation through socialism. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 16 June 1989 "productive" labour (ie usually industrial block as this definition might scem to Marx indentified two broad sections of "unproductive" worker reduces the costs to the capitalist of appropriating surplus the working class: those involved in out of the capitalist'sslush fund of surplus machinery), and those in 'unproductive' value extracted from productive labour, to Labour. This includes those who are paid, produce" or run services on their behalf. - fuel, textiles, In turn, the unpaid labour of the value produced elsewhere. jobs making "things"
production and in the pocket. The working clanx. is still there, waiting to be won, Which explains why there can be a Tory government and still a For favourable shifts in the economy and un- derlying