Does working a computer for wages make her middle class or working class?
What is the working class?
CLASS OF
'89
ASIC S 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 working class, lacking. Class divisions in Britain are now a thing of the past, according to Conservative Education Secretary Kenneth Baker, speaking in a interview for Hugo Young's recent television review of the "Thatcher Years'. 'You look around you and you can't tell what class people are any more. Ten years ago you could have.', he said. This was, he added, one of the great successes of the Thatcher revolution' - brought about by council house and share sales (with, presumably, some help from Next and Marks and Spencer).
Many on the left seem to agree with him. We 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 more (a handy formulation too, for a Labour leadership with no intention of rescuing us —or the dockers — anyway).
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.
-Ten years of change
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 collar jobs (factories, production lines, mines) traditionally identified in popular understanding as working class jobs.
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 is now, we are told (before the recent increase in inflation and mortgate rates), better off.
Farewell to the working class?
When you apply the common sense critera for assessing class (elevated into a science by sociologists and pollsters) - categories of "status, income/jobs, or, failing that, status of housing tenure - then the "working class", so defined, starts to score lower.
It's not surprising 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 working class itself.
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 beneath the surface ofapparent changes which many are cager to embrace as the dawn of a new era where class distinctions - and conflict -have been discarded along with clogs, shawin and cloth caps.
closer look beneath the
Marxism offers a more subtle and analytical - essentially materialist - approach. Because it examinesthe "objective", or the real roots of the problem and not just its "subjective appearance, if can stand the test of time.
Capitalist society, according to Marx, is built on the division of people into groups -classes - according lo their place in their economy and their relationship to production.
The bourgeoisie, or ruling class, owns the means of production (factories, banks, companies). Ir Lives offincome-the "surplus value? (its profits, share dividends and sales) - that it extracts from the working class.
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 doctors) also come into this category. Their allegiances are weaker, but ultimately with the capitalist system — as long as it allows then to fourish. The growth of this class has heen a marked feature of the last decade.
The working class - most of the rest ofes sells its lahour power.
The definition of class, then, comes from the relationship of these major groups in society, rather than being a static category defined hy merely occupation or income, lifestyle or place
in the pecking order,
That relationship, between the bourgeoisie and the working class, is necessarily anlagonistic, as capital inevitably attempts to extract more surplus value from the working class foritself. The confict and struggle berween capital and wage labour is the class struggle. Class and conflict are necessarily connected. Class is also objoctive' - out there in the real world whether it is perceived as such or not - and not subjective" (ic dependent on the analytical abilities of some trendy academies, or the class consciousnes
But it isn't quite that simple, or crude.
The working class is not so uniform a block as this definition might scem to
Marx indentified two broad sections of the working class: those involved in "productive" labour (ie usually industrial jobs making "things" - fuel, textiles, machinery), and those in 'unproductive' Labour. This includes those who are paid, out of the capitalist'sslush fund of surplus value extracted from productive labour, to produce" or run services on their behalf. In turn, the unpaid labour of the "unproductive" worker reduces the costs to the capitalist of appropriating surplus value produced elsewhere.
In Marx's day this category of workers would have comprised servants and a small number of charity and state administrators, for example. Today, where surplus value supports the welfare state and a whole range of staffed state functions, as well as the private service sector, "unproductive workers" are an ever-expanding section of the workforce - and might include everyone from teachers to school meals staff (still) employed by the state, from secretaries in local government to refuse collectors 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 frcedom from exploitation through socialism.
Emest Mandel, writing in his introduction to a volume of Mark's Capital, explained that "the defining structural characterisation of 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: nonownership of the means of production; lack of direct access to means of livelihood: inability to purchase the means of livelihood without more or less continuous sale of labour power,
IF we don't understand or accept both as pair of the proletariat, then it is easy to see nonproductive 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
+ Desperate in the DHSS: Thatcherism has widened the gulf between rich and poor 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 people into the category of "not real workers".
This is the mistake of the Marxism Today current and the wider, sociologically-inclined analysis prevalent in the traditionally a-historical and anti-theory British Labour movement.
One of the soft left's favourite theorisers, the late Nicos Poulantzas, fell into this trap and identifies all non-productive labour as constituting a 'new-petty bourgeoisie'. Applying this defenition it would be possible chop the US working class at a stroke down to just 20 per cent of the American population, leaving this newly defined "new petty bourgeoisie" with 70 percent -including. for example, refuse collectors and hospital porters.
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 alternative political method.
What about the workers?
Where does all this leave 'new working class workers - those, often in white collar jobs in new or newly expanding expanding, usually service sector industries (eg high-tec light industrial production, finance, hanking. leisure, services - public and private) which are of growing importance in the European economy? A Marxist analysis puts them with the proletariat. Although sociologically speaking they may be 'middle class" (defined as a set of nons, lifestyles and attitudes), this in no way makes them part of the pelly bourgeoisie.
But many workers are, undoubtedly, in an
- ambiguous, or contradictory relationship to the means of produc-.
tion. Most white-collar workers are fully paid up members of the proletariat since they have no control over their own, or others"
labour. But there is a significant, if smaller layer who, although they don't own the means of production.
may control production or the labour power of a group of workers.
They may even have control over investment in and resourcing of production.
Where a worker, say, manages a budget and department in local govemment, oversees a factory production line, or draws up and implements company business plans
(or hospital cuts and closures) - or is even perhaps a bond dealer with no substantial sharcholdings of her/his own - then their contradictory 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 investment/resource allocation.
There have always heen sections of the working class, who, because of their particular relationship to the process of production, have occupied such a contradictory class position.
The type of jobs they do, and their relative numbers and importance in the working class as a whole may have changed over the last ten years. They are materially affected by their role in production and the economy. This will affect their attitudes and politics - perhaps even their perception of class - but not their class itself.
Have working class attitudes changed?
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 more Thatcherite in its values?
Working class people are subject to (and may sometimes actively seck out) contradicfory pressures, many of them economic (for example baving a stake in the profitability of capitalism. through property or share ownership) or ideological (patriotic allegiance to an imperialist power, or buying The Sun, for exit is an apparently expanding layer of workers expused to such pressures, and the hetter 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 revisionists have been pontificating and predicting the 'embourgeoisment" of the working class since the 1950's and 60's (when
Labour Iost three elections in a row, too, and the nation was told "you've never had it so
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 16 June 1989