How Might Class Drive a Movement?

By | March 31, 2020

I have referred on and off to the chances of a left-movement anticipating, hastening and responding to a state legitimation crisis caused by COVID-19. I have always insisted that to stand any chance of affecting real social change such a movement would have to be class-driven. In a recent post I approvingly quoted Erik Olin Wright’s argument that there is an important role for what he calls ‘an abstract simplified class concept’. While he fully acknowledged that any such concept would have limited utility for sociological purposes, he argued that it would permit a clarification of the real mechanisms that actual actors face.’

So what is this ‘abstract simplified class concept’? I will quote his words again:
I define capitalists as those people who own and control the capital used in production and workers as all employees excluded from such ownership and control. In this abstract analysis of class structure I assume that these are mutually exclusive categories. There is thus no middle class as such. No workers own any stock. Executives, managers, and professionals in firms are either amalgamated into the capitalist class by virtue of their ownership of stock and command of production, or they are simply part of the working class as employees.’
To reiterate, for many – probably, most – sociological purposes this doesn’t work. It is inappropriate for studies of changes in social mobility for example. But it is a horse that has a course in my view.

I regard the following triad as empirically established, indeed beyond dispute:
• The nature of the work force in the UK (and typicilly elsewhere) has radically altered since my childhood in the post-WW2 years. Most starkly, what Marx defined as the industrial proletariat has shrunk massively from the majority of the workforce that it once enveloped.
• Relatedly, class no longer informs workers’ identities as it used to. It follows from this that class consciousness is much diminished and far more difficult than hitherto to arouse.
• Capital ownership and the state power it buys – or increasingly exercises direct from within the Cabinet – to manipulate policy is now concentrated among a small core of the capital executive that I term ‘capital monopolists’. The capital monopolists comprise well under one per cent of the population.
I have also argued previously: (a) that the capital executive/monopolists and the state’s power elite have purchased allies or ’co-optees’ from across all classes; (b) that what Standing calls ‘precarity’ is now also commonplace across class boundaries; and (c) that as Wright’s notion of ‘contradictory locations’ rightly avers, many middle-class locations are ‘betwixt and between’: in other words there is often a considerable heterogeneity of assets, interests, aspirations and loyalties within occupational clusters.

So how, given all this, and in particular the dissolution of the industrial proletariat, might the working class function as the basis for, or driver of, a people’s movement for socialism?

Jeremy Gilbert makes some salient points in his recent Twenty-First Century Socialism. For Marx, he points out, the ‘middle classes’ – ‘the petit bourgeois owners of small businesses, professionals such as teachers, doctors and lawyers’ – were expected to fade into insignificance. Marx saw them in any case as irretrievably reactionary. And indeed they proved reactionary when they typically fell in behind fascism in the 1930s. But they didn’t fade away, nor are they (any longer) irretrievably reactionary. This segment of society now comprises ‘a subclass of more or less well paid, highly educated, highly organised workers whose natural political sympathies are to the left’ (emphasis added).

It is true, contra Marx, that the industrial working class, the traditional base for socialist and labour politics, has been dwindling for decades, with some more affluent workers becoming homeowners and pension holders with a vested interest in the rewards of capital ownership. However, the petite bourgeoisie has expanded very considerably:
‘today far more people are self-employed in the private sector or work for small to medium-sized businesses than was the case forty-years ago. The middle classes are larger, a more variegated collection of subgroups (or class factions) than ever before, and they have complex sets of political allegiances. The traditional petite bourgeoisie of medium-sized business owners and of corporate middle management remains the bedrock of political reaction … But public sector professionals constitute a distinctive group that shares absolutely nothing with them, despite also being characterised as ‘middle class’; teachers, for example, are more likely than almost any other group to be members of trade unions and to vote for left-wing parties.’
We have also seen the emergence of what Gilbert calls ‘the new petite bourgeoisie’, comprising entrepreneurs and freelancers, notably in the technology and media sectors. Their political allegiances tend to be fluid. Although in many ways attracted to personal freedom and cultural individualism, they are also sympathetic to limiting the powers of banks and major corporations and are concerned at issues around the environment and climate change.

Gilbert’s thesis, to which I am sympathetic, is that there are fragments of the new petite bourgeoisie which, although seen as middle class, are open to persuasion by campaigns and narratives from the left. Returning to Wright’s ‘abstract simplified class concept’, many of their number might be (re-)defined as working class.

Where does this leave us? I have contended in previous blogs that socialists must look to coalitions to build an effective movement. The statistics tell us that this necessarily means expanding beyond an historical base in the industrial working class. And I am not just thinking here of the election of a Labour government: after all, Labour in government invariably caved in when push came to shove. As Ralph Miliband convincingly maintained, the Labour Party and ‘parliamentary democracy’ (or capitalist democracy) amount to nothing in the absence of the fuel and fire of a strong public movement.

So my current thinking suggests the following:
• An effective socialist movement depends on an appeal to many class factions, all of which under Wright’s rubric might for the purposes of class struggle reasonably be considered part and parcel of the working class.
• This will involve the formation a coalition of multiple alliances between campaign groups across multiple issues (eg from issues of wealth, income, work and housing to the environment and climate change and to those of race, gender and sexuality and democratic participation).
• For any such coalition to be an effective force and neophyte movement it will be necessary to construct a compelling general narrative for social transformation and change around which disparate groups and individuals can bind and bond.
• A strategy of ‘permanent reform’ is a probable means to bring people and groups together, namely, a strategy of pushing for consensual, ‘manageable’ reforms prior to generating momentum for further step-by-step social changes.

I end with two final observations. The first is the rider that Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect must for any sociologist be edging it over his optimism of the will. And the second is that the COVID-19 pandemic – a natural experiment that is revealing much that is dysfunctional, unjust and perverse in financialised capitalism – is an obvious invitation to rethink the nature of our sociality, institutions and society itself.

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