Why Marx Was Right (19 page)

The working class for Marx
is in one sense a specific social group. Yet because it signifies for him the
wrong which keeps so many other kinds of wrong in business (imperial wars,
colonial expansion, famine, genocide, the plundering of Nature, to some extent
racism and patriarchy), it has a significance far beyond its own sphere. In
this sense, it resembles the scapegoat in ancient societies, which is cast out
of the city because it represents a universal crime, but which for just the
same reason has the power to become the cornerstone of a new social order.
Because it is both necessary to and excluded by the capitalist system, this
''class which is not a class'' is a kind of riddle or conundrum. In a quite
literal sense, it creates the social order—it is on its silent, persistent
labour that the whole mighty edifice is reared—yet it can find no real
representation within that order, no full recognition of its humanity. It is
both functional and dispossessed, specific and universal, an integral part of
civil society yet a kind of nothing.

Because the very
foundation of society is in this sense self-contradictory, the working class
signifies the point at which the whole logic of that order begins to unravel
and dissolve. It is the joker in the pack of civilisation, the factor which is
neither securely inside nor outside it, the place where that form of life is
forced to confront the very contradictions that constitute it. Because the
working class has no real stake in the status quo, it is partly invisible
within it; but for just the same reason it can prefigure an alternative future.
It is the ''dissolution'' of society in the sense of its negation—the garbage
or waste product for which the social order can find no real place. In this
sense, it acts as a sign of just what a radical breaking and remaking would be
needed to include it. But it is also the dissolution of present society in a
more positive sense, as the class which when it comes to power will finally
abolish class-society altogether. Individuals will then finally be free of the
straitjacket of social class, and will be able to flourish as themselves. In
this sense, the working class is also ''universal'' because in seeking to
transform its own condition, it can also ring down the curtain on the whole
squalid narrative of class-society as such.

Here, then, is another
irony or contradiction—the fact that it is only through class that class can be
overcome. If Marxism is so taken with the concept of class, it is only because
it wants to see the back of it. Marx himself seems to have viewed social class
as a form of alienation. To call men and women simply ''workers'' or
''capitalists'' is to bury their unique individuality beneath a faceless
category. But it is an alienation that can be undone only from the inside. Only
by going all the way through class, accepting it as an unavoidable social
reality rather than wishing it piously away, can it be dismantled. It is just
the same with race and gender. It is not enough to treat every individual as
unique, as with those American liberals for whom everyone (including,
presumably, Donald Trump and the Boston Strangler) is ''special.'' The fact
that people are massed anonymously together may be in one sense an alienation,
but in another sense it is a condition of their emancipation. Once again,
history moves by its ''bad'' side. Well-meaning liberals who regard every
member of the Ruritanian Liberation Movement as a unique individual have failed
to grasp the purpose of the Ruritanian Liberation Movement. Its aim is to get
to the point where Ruritanians can indeed be free to be themselves. If they
could be that right now, however, they would not need their Liberation
Movement.

There is another sense in
which Marxism looks beyond the working class in the act of looking to it. No
self-respecting socialist has ever believed that the working class can bring
down capitalism all by itself. Only by forging political alliances is such a
daunting task conceivable. Marx himself thought that the working class should
support the petty bourgeois peasantry, not least in countries like France,
Russia and Germany where industrial workers were still a minority. The
Bolsheviks sought to forge a united front of workers, poor peasants, soldiers,
sailors, urban intellectuals and so on.

It is worth noting in this
respect that the original proletariat was not the blue-collar male working
class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word ''proletariat''
comes to us from the Latin word for ''offspring,'' meaning those who were too
poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs. Too deprived to
contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power
in the form of children. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their
bodies. What society demanded from them was not production but reproduction.
The proletariat started life among those outside the labour process, not those
within it. Yet the labour they endured was a lot more painful than breaking
boulders.

Today, in an era of Third
World sweatshops and agricultural labour, the typical proletarian is still a
woman. White-collar work which in Victorian times was performed mostly by
lower-middle-class men is nowadays largely the reserve of working-class women,
who are typically paid less than unskilled male manual workers. It was women,
too, who mostly staffed the huge expansion in shop and clerical work which
followed the decline in heavy industry after the First World War. In Marx's own
time, the largest group of wage labourers was not the industrial working class
but domestic servants, most of whom were female.

The working class, then,
is not always male, brawny and handy with a sledgehammer. If you think of it
that way, you will be bemused by the geographer David Harvey's claim that ''the
global proletariat is far larger than ever.''
⁴
If the working class
means blue-collar factory workers, then it has indeed diminished sharply in
advanced capitalist societies—though this is partly because a fair slice of
such work has been exported to more poverty-stricken regions of the planet. It
remains true, however, that industrial employment on a global scale has
declined. Yet even when Britain was the workshop of the world, manufacturing
workers were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers.
⁵
And the tendency for manual labour to decline and white-collar work to expand
is no ''postmodern'' phenomenon. On the contrary, it can be dated back to the
start of the twentieth century.

Marx himself did not
consider that you had to engage in manual labour to count as working class. In
Capital,
for example, he ranks commercial workers on the same level as
industrial ones, and refuses to identify the proletariat solely with so-called
productive workers, in the sense of those who directly turn out commodities.
Rather, the working class includes all those who are forced to sell their
labour power to capital, who languish under its oppressive disciplines and who
have little or no control over their conditions of labour. Negatively speaking,
we might describe them as those who would benefit most from the fall of
capitalism. In this sense, lower-level white-collar workers, who are often
unskilled, with poor wages, job insecurity and little say in the labour process
are to be counted among its ranks. There is a white-collar working class as well
as an industrial one, which includes a great many technical, clerical and
administrative workers bereft of any autonomy or authority. Class, we should
recall, is a matter not just of abstract legal ownership, but the capacity to
deploy one's power over others to one's own advantage.

Among those eager to
preside over the funeral rites of the working class, much has been made of the
immense growth in the service, information and communications sectors. The
transition from industrial to "late," "consumerist,''
"postindustrial" or ''postmodern'' capitalism has indeed involved
some notable changes, as we have seen earlier. But we have also seen that none
of this has altered the fundamental nature of capitalist property relations. On
the contrary, such changes have mostly been in the interest of expanding and
consolidating them. It is also worth recalling that work in the service sector
can be just as heavy, dirty and disagreeable as traditional industrial labour.
We need to think not just of upmarket chefs and Harley Street receptionists but
of dockers, transport, refuse, postal, hospital, cleaning and catering workers.
Indeed, the distinction between manufacture and service workers, as far as pay,
control and conditions go, is often well-nigh invisible. Those who work in call
centres are just as exploited as those who toil in coal mines. Labels such as
''service'' or ''white-collar'' serve to obscure massive differences between,
say, airline pilots and hospital porters, or senior civil servants and hotel
chambermaids. As Jules Townshend comments, ''To categorise lower-level white
collar workers, who have no control over their labour and experience job
insecurity and poor wages, as nonmembers of the working-class is intuitively
questionable.''
⁶

In any case, the service
industry itself involves a sizeable amount of manufacture. If the industrial
worker has given way to the bank clerk and the barmaid, where did all the
counters, desks, bars, computers and cash machines come from? A waitress,
chauffeur, teaching assistant or computer operator does not count as middle
class simply because he or she churns out no tangible product. As far as their
material interests go, they have as much a stake in creating a more equitable
social order as the most sorely exploited of wage slaves. We should keep in
mind, too, the vast army of the retired, unemployed and chronically sick, who
along with casual labourers are not a permanent part of the ''official'' labour
process but who certainly count as working class.

It is true that there has
been an immense expansion in technical, administrative and managerial jobs, as
capitalism deploys its technology to squeeze a larger amount of goods out of a
much smaller body of workers. Yet if this is no disproval of Marxism, it is
partly because Marx himself took scrupulous note of it. As long ago as the
mid-nineteenth century, he is to be found writing of the "constantly
growing number of the middle classes,'' which he rebukes orthodox political
economy for overlooking. These are men and women ''situated midway between the
workers on the one side and the capitalists on the other''
⁷
—a phrase
that should be enough to discredit the myth that Marx reduces the complexity of
modern society to two starkly polarized classes. In fact, one commentator argues
that he envisaged the virtual disappearance of the proletariat as it was known
in his own time. Capitalism, far from being overturned by the famished and
dispossessed, would be brought low by the application of advanced scientific
techniques to the production process, a situation that would produce a society
of free and equal individuals. Whatever one thinks of this reading of Marx,
there is no doubt that he was well aware of how the capitalist process of
production was already drawing more and more technical and scientific labour
into its orbit. He speaks in the
Grundrisse
of ''general social
knowledge [becoming] a direct productive force,'' a phrase that prefigures what
some would now call the information society.

Yet the spread of the
technical and administrative sectors has been accompanied by a progressive
blurring of lines between working class and middle class. The new information
technologies have spelled the disappearance of many traditional occupations,
along with a drastic dwindling of economic stability, settled career structures
and the idea of a vocation. One effect of this has been an increasing
proletarianisation of professionals, along with a re-proletarianisation of
branches of the industrial working class. As John Gray puts it, ''The middle
classes are rediscovering the condition of assetless economic insecurity that
afflicted the nineteenth-century proletariat.''
⁸
Many of those who
would be traditionally labelled lower-middle class—teachers, social workers,
technicians, journalists, middling clerical and administrative officials— have
been subject to a relentless process of proletarianisation, as they come under
pressure from tightening management disciplines. And this means that they are
more likely to be drawn to the cause of the working class proper in the event
of a political crisis.

It would, of course, be an
excellent thing for socialists if top managers, administrators and business
executives were to throw in their hand with their cause as well. Marxists have
nothing against judges, rock stars, media magnates and majorgenerals flooding
enthusiastically into their ranks. There is no ban on Rupert Murdoch and Paris
Hilton, as long as they were to prove suitably repentant and undergo a lengthy
period of penance. Even Martin Amis and Tom Cruise might be granted some form
of junior, strictly temporary membership. It is just that such individuals,
given their social status and material position, are more likely to identify
with the current system. If, however, it was for some curious reason in the
interests of fashion designers but not postal workers to see an end to that
system, then Marxists would focus their political attention on fashion
designers and strongly oppose the advance of postal workers.

The situation, then, is by
no means as clear-cut as the Death-of-the-Worker ideologues would suggest. In
the top echelons of society we have what can justly be called the ruling class,
though it is by no means a conspiracy of wicked capitalists. Its ranks include
aristocrats, judges, senior lawyers and clerics, media barons, top military
brass and media commentators, high-ranking politicians, police officers and
civil servants, professors (a few of them political renegades), big landlords,
bankers, stockbrokers, industrialists, chief executives, heads of public
schools and so on. Most of these are not capitalists themselves, but act,
however indirectly, as the agents of capital. Whether they live off capital,
rents or salaried incomes makes no difference to this point. Not all those who
earn a wage or salary are working class. Think of Britney Spears. Below this
top social layer stretches a stratum of middle-class managers, scientists,
administrators, bureaucrats and the like; and below them in turn lies a range
of lower-middle-class occupations such as teachers, social workers and junior
managers. The working class proper can then be taken to encompass both manual
labourers and the lower levels of white-collar workers: clerical, technical,
administrative, service and so on. And this is a massive proportion of the
world population. Chris Harman estimates the size of the global working class
at around two billion, with a similar number being subject to much the same
economic logic.
⁹
Another estimate puts it at around three billion.
¹⁰
The working class seems to have disappeared rather less successfully than Lord
Lucan.
¹¹