A world to win: class struggle and the Communist Manifesto

A young Karl Marx

In August I gave a talk on the Communist Manifesto at an event organised by Counterfire in Newcastle. I have just got around to collating my notes into readable form. I built my presentation, which focused especially on themes of history and class struggle in the Manifesto (two other sessions addressed different aspects), around a series of quotations from the original text. Here we go...

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Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a manifesto for the Communist League in late 1847. Economic crisis had affected much of Europe in the previous couple of years. Revolution was in the air. Communists were making connections across borders and beginning to get organised, but were still small in number. The opening line of the Manifesto -  ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.’ – was more wishful thinking than accurate description.

Engels had drafted something in rather dry question-and-answer form, but it was Marx who turned this – in the space of a few weeks at the start of 1848 – into what would become the most widely-read, influential and famous political pamphlet ever published. It was the culmination of several years’ intellectual and political development in Marx’s thinking, an attempt to state clearly what communists stood for.

There was a culture of secret and conspiratorial societies at the time, but Marx and Engels rejected this. If the emancipation of the working class is to be the act of the working class, there is little purpose served by secrecy. Ideas must be stated openly and persuasively.

By the time it was published, revolution had broken out in a number of parts of Europe – 1848 would turn out to be an historic year of revolutionary upheaval, though most of it defeated. The Manifesto in fact turned out to be something quite different to what might be expected. It almost entirely avoided specific policy prescriptions. It contained a broad survey of historical development rather than keeping its attention trained on present politics. It was expressed in often powerful, even poetic, language.

At the core of the Manifesto is a particular conception of history and how change happens: an understanding of society as being divided, fundamentally, into classes, and history as a succession of class societies (and class struggles).  Marx writes:

'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.’

This is an important starting point: class is the main dividing line in society. This is not unique to capitalism , but rather has been true for thousands of years. It is a division that inevitably engenders conflict too.

Marx then provides a sweeping survey of the development of early capitalism, moving on to the era of industrial capitalism through which he was living:

'Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.’

So, capitalism grew out of an earlier feudal society. Merchant capitalism increasingly replaced feudal relations, and in turn this grew into industrial capitalism. A new urban elite developed: the bourgeoisie. Although Marx refers to ‘two great classes’, this shouldn’t be taken to indicate anything about their size: the proletariat, those who do the work, are far greater in number than those who live off the surplus their labour produces. Marx specifically traces the growth of industry:

‘Steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.’

This kind of language is almost celebratory – and the tone often surprises first-time readers, expecting virulent denunciation of capitalism’s evils from the beginning. Of course Marx doesn’t leave it there, but he does take time to extol the progress represented by capitalism’s development. He writes of the revolutionising role played by capitalism, its economically dynamic quality and the way that overturns many established certainties:

‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.’

Marx and Engels had first met a few years earlier (and went on to be lifelong collaborators). In 1844 Engels wrote ‘The Condition of the working class in England’ about the impact of industrial capitalism on the living and working conditions of those drawn into the newly mushrooming cities. It was an ugly and unromantic picture. Marx and Engels had no illusions about the often grim reality of industrial capitalism for the proletariat, the working class.

What they grasped was how capitalism accelerated the pace of technological and economic change, went together with the growth of major cities and created greater opportunities for wealth (largely concentrated, though, among a tiny class of those who owned and controlled the means of production).

The development of the modern nation state went together with the growth of capitalism. This was a deeply contested process. The English, American and French revolutions were all, whatever their differences, about the rising bourgeois class asserting itself against the barriers inherited from late feudalism. Political revolutions, with varying degrees of success, accompanied the economic changes. Marx wrote:

‘Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.’

1848 was itself a year of bourgeois revolution. Although mostly unsuccessful, the uprisings left their mark – and in the decades that followed there was much greater political unification and centralisation in many parts of Europe, (limited) advances in democratic reform, the strengthening of modern state institutions (e.g. police forces), and so on.

But capitalism did something else, something enormously important for Marx, Engels and their comrades in the small Communist League. It created the working class. It brought together large numbers of workers in factories, mills and elsewhere - a process that was dangerous for the capitalists:

‘The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’

There is a lot packed in to this quotation. Firstly, it is identifying that growing industry brought turned people who had previously worked on the land, or perhaps as artisans, into workers - wage-labourers dependent on selling their labour power to the capitalist to make a living. Secondly, proletarianisation (working class formation) is a collective process, bringing workers together in combination. So, too, is proletarian resistance to capitalism a collective matter. Workers’ power is not as individuals, but as a collective force.  Finally, this collective power of workers is so potentially great that it can defeat the bourgeoisie and end capitalism, a system that has paradoxically created its own gravedigger.

Marx’s account of history, specifically the rise and development of capitalism (and the potential for moving from capitalism to socialism), therefore has class division at its heart, but also an awareness of the centrality of class struggle. The division into classes, and the exploitation at the heart of class relationships, inevitably generates conflict over what is produced and how the surplus wealth is allocated.

But Marx also had interesting things to say about the battle of ideas in society, and how that is shaped by material realities. Imagining himself addressing the bourgeois class, he wrote:

‘The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.’

This is a brutal warning and a reality check. Every ruling class imagines its own ideas and values to be a kind of ‘common sense’: universal values, taken for granted and seemingly obvious. In fact ideas change over time. The dominant ideology of one age may later seem antiquated. Changing ideas are shaped by material changes in the conditions of society: ‘the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property’.

History moves forward. Material production – the forces and relations of production – changes over time. So, with it, do the dominant ideas change:

‘What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’

Marx points here to another vital aspect of ideology: it is the ideas of the ruling elite that are universalised as the ideas of a whole society. Whether through control of state religion, or schools and universities, or the media, the ruling class – the tiny elite possessing wealth and power – asserts its own ideas and values.

Yet there is no fatalism in the Manifesto. Running through it is an acute consciousness of historical change – transformation indeed – and the potential for further transformation in the future. The working class, identified as the collective agent of transformation, is not doomed to be tied to the ruling ideology. It is driven to resist by exploitation.

The working class is gathered together in large numbers and can organise collectively. Writing against the backdrop of Chartism, a mass working class movement coming to its end in 1848, Marx and Engels were aware of what was possible. There had been the earliest examples of strike action by the 1840s. There had been early efforts at building trade unions.

The class that can organise and resist collectively, can also set about creating a new world – one characterised by co-operation, equality and democracy, not the rule of the few over the many. There is little detail on what a communist or socialist society might look like, but this is a starting point:

‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’

So communism is, ultimately, to be a classless society. And in that state of equality and interdependence lies the potential for human development and liberation. But there’s also recognition that such a future vision must be linked to current struggles, if it is to be anything more than a utopian dream. Marx succinctly outlines the tasks of communists:

‘In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.’

Three points here, all of them acutely relevant as the Manifesto was circulated amidst growing revolutionary tumult in 1848: communists support democratic or bourgeois revolutions (whatever their limitations might be), working class economic and social interests (‘the property question’) must always be forefront, and the movement must be international, uniting workers across national boundaries and opposing a common enemy. Class, not nationhood, is what unites us.

The Manifesto ends, then, with these stirring words:

‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!’

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We (still) need to talk about class

My review of 'Socialist Register 2015: Transforming Classes', eds. Leo Panitch and Greg Albo (Merlin Press 2014), was originally published on Counterfire.

The 2015 volume of Socialist Register, the annual journal of left-wing theory dating back to the 1960s, continues the same broad theme as last year’s volume (which I also reviewed for Counterfire). Both issues of the journal are concerned with contemporary changes in class structure and class politics.

Taken together, these two volumes are a concerted reassertion of the centrality of class to understanding society and to mapping the future of radical and left politics. This is at a time when class is an unfashionable concept and the working class is widely viewed as no longer a collective agent of social change.

At times it feels like the contributions are so diverse that the theme - transforming classes - is rather too loose. The ruling class, the middle class and the working class are all covered, with the last of these receiving the lion’s share of attention. There is truly global coverage, with the eighteen essays (mostly by left-wing academics with an intellectual background in Marxism) including contributions on China, India, South Africa, Turkey, Egypt, Brazil and Chile. This year there is very little specifically on Britain – or in fact anywhere in Europe – while there is a lively series of four interlinked essays devoted to working-class politics, resistance and organisation in the US.

The collection is very disparate, but there are a number of basic political ideas that are just about universally shared among the contributors. They still regard class as a relevant concept; indeed, they typically see it as the fundamental division and relationship in society. The volume as a whole asserts the continuing centrality of class to making sense of the world we live in, through tracing the specific changes taking place in class composition or in the balance of forces between classes. This combination of fidelity to viewing class as the dominant social relationship and flexibility in relating that to evolving conditions is a great strength.

It is also the case that contributors, as might be expected in a socialist journal, adopt a partisan standpoint of support for working-class interests and for various forms of working-class resistance and organisation. For me, probably the most interesting and useful dimension of the volume is precisely the analysis of concrete examples of working-class politics, resistance and organisation, which comes through strongly in several contributions. The backdrop here is the impact of 35 years of neoliberalism, a sustained effort to shift the balance between capital and labour in favour of the former.

As the editors, Leo Panitch and Greg Albo, note in their preface: inequality has grown ‘in the political conditions and social struggles allowing the spread and deepening of capitalist social relations’ (Preface, p.x). The 2014 and 2015 volumes combined should, I think, be seen as a major project in charting the impact of neoliberalism on class relations and class politics globally, with special attention paid to those hopeful developments in working-class organisation that point to a different future.

A substantial essay by Susan Ferguson and David McNally is especially pertinent at the time of writing, as it explores the role of migration in contemporary working-class formation. It is a sophisticated analysis which weaves together different elements within a ‘social reproduction’ framework, doing an excellent job of highlighting the centrality of migrant labour to global capitalism and exploring what that means for migrant workers and their families.

There is a little too much academic jargon, but the arguments and ideas are valuable. The authors thoughtfully consider the intersections of class, gender and race in a broadly Marxist framework, always alert to the fundamental role of the economy in shaping society – and to the experience of work as integral to working-class experience – without being reductive.

The politics of the ruling class

The re-shaping of the ruling class is an important theme in a number of essays, most dramatically in Lin Chun’s piece on China. The topic is hugely important considering the remarkable economic growth of China in recent years, and very topical as I write this because of the financial turmoil in the country. The essay examines how China has been transformed as it has opened up to capitalist globalisation.

Alongside this there has been a shift in Chinese ruling-class discourse, balancing precariously between the supposed benefits of an increasingly neoliberal model and the old rhetoric of state Communism. An intriguing aspect of the shifting discourse is the complete invisibility of any reference to class, which would of course point towards the social inequalities in China and, even more dangerously, to the notion that a collective force may exist that can change society.

Achin Vanaik, writing on India, is also perceptive about the shifts in ruling-class and dominant politics, including the ideas and language deployed to sustain ruling-class power.  It is an excellent attempt at explaining how the reactionary BJP has come to replace the traditionally dominant Indian National Congress as the country’s most successful political party. It analyses the political crisis of the old order, and its roots, while looking at the social base of the BJP. The growth of the middle class is indispensable to understanding this, though Vanaik avoids any simplistic reductionism.

The other key reference point is something dating back to the late 1980s: ‘a neoliberal turn in the economy being accompanied by the rise of a Hindutava-influenced consolidation of ‘common sense’ socially and a stronger authoritarian inflection politically’ (p.57).

Developments in the working class

Two very different contributions focus on the middle class in particular: John McCullough writes about Hollywood representations of the middle class over time, while Randy Martin asks ‘what happened to the professional middle class?’

However, it is those which focus on the working class that really form the main body of this volume. These essays allow much greater scope for discussing class struggle and political action, as well as tracing developments in work and in the material composition of the working class. Two essays especially are fascinating on the complex developments in working-class movements in recent years: one on South Africa, the other on Egypt.

Sam Ashman and Nicolas Pons-Vignon assess the problems with successive ANC governments in South Africa and how the once mighty movement, which united many behind its banner in fighting to end apartheid, has been deeply compromised by administering cuts and privatisations in office. However, what is most interesting is the focus on developing alternatives: in the union movement, in the social movements, and in the field of electoral politics, with some valuable insight into how these interact with each other.

The great trade-union federation COSATU has suffered a crisis precisely because of its relationship to the ANC government, leading to some hopeful fresh developments. The metalworkers’ union NUMSA has moved to the left and been in repeated conflict with the ANC. The authors conclude:

‘The fact that the current contestation in South Africa, driven by a radical union and involving a growing number of workers, combines a powerful counter-movement to neoliberalism with a socialist political vision is of global significance’ (p.108).

Joel Beinin and Marie Duboc focus on workers’ struggles in Egypt since the revolution overthrew Mubarak in early 2011. It is refreshing to see such close attention to this vital dimension of Egypt’s upheavals in recent years. The essay charts the long-term development of labour movement struggles over some years – before and after the revolution – and identifies pre-2011 strikes as a major stream flowing into the revolutionary events.

It also draws attention to the role of the long-term neoliberal restructuring of the Egyptian economy in fuelling working-class revolt. It ends with a sober assessment of Egyptian politics, as of 2014, acknowledging that the left’s failure to develop a coherent and organised political alternative to mainstream political forces has been (and remains) a huge obstacle to positive social and economic change.

Class in the 21st century

Perhaps the most wide-ranging contribution is by Hugo Radice; his ‘Class theory and class politics today’ is as sweeping as its title suggests. Radice’s starting point is the BBC survey in 2013 which posited seven different classes in modern British society. He recognises that this model reflects genuine fragmentation in society, but is also critical of it, not least because it fails to identify how social classes interact with each other and it doesn’t involve any sense of class struggle.

He suggests that we need class analysis that wrestles with both increased polarisation and increased fragmentation, and which grasps social conflict between classes (and the significance of it for how we evolve as a society).

This leads him on to direct engagement with Marx’s writings, and their relevance today, and an interesting discussion of the middle class, its composition and relationship to other classes. He is sensitive to different to Marxist interpretations of the middle class and provides a thought-provoking summary of how the middle class has evolved.

Radice concludes with some welcome observations on the continuing importance of work as central to how class divisions are created and reproduced, also identifying a few important trends in the world of work under the impact of neoliberalism. His comments on resistance and organisation at work, though, are rather vaguer and very much under-developed.

The American working class

The volume concludes with a series of four pieces on the American working class, its politics and organisations, which taken together are referred to as a ‘symposium’ on Labour and the left in the USA. I found these fascinating, especially when read in conjunction with each other. Although there’s no direct dialogue between them, there is a sense of coherence and of different contributions adding up to an overall understanding of the topic.

Kim Moody and Charles Post, in a jointly authored piece, provide a useful overview of the long-term decline of the power of labour in American society, tracing the numerical decline, bureaucratisation and hollowing out of unions. They analyse the relationship between this and major economic changes and policies during the last few decades.

However, they also – more hopefully – summarise some strategies for renewal, referring to concrete examples of what has already been done and indicating what might be worth generalising. Campaigning by fast-food workers and their supporters is one good example; the movement of Chicago teachers is another. These are examples of struggles that have incorporated social movement tactics and been tied up with union recruitment and capacity building.

It is the concrete struggles and forms of organising that provide most of the material for the other three contributions to the symposium. One called ‘New working-class organization and the social-movement left’ develops the theme of the interaction between traditional workers’ organisations and methods of struggles with social movements and the issues they champion. The range of examples is tremendously insightful and provides a powerful sense of how the labour movement might potentially be built anew.

Another piece takes a long view, examining the evolution of working-class struggle and organisation from the post-war boom onwards, concluding that stronger and more combative trade unions remain indispensable to any project of left-wing renewal, while also grasping that this will take forms that reflect changed realities.

Jane McAlevey’s contribution, meanwhile, is a compelling case study about union building among hospital workers, which shares important successes from which we can learn and be inspired, while also being soberly realistic about the limitations.

Wealth of material on social changes

Overall, this volume is a very worthwhile complement to last year’s first instalment in the journal’s project of analysing class society and class politics in today’s world. It simultaneously restates the centrality of class and traces the most important changes in work, class composition and the balance of forces between capital and labour. It is truly global, which is both a strength and a minor weakness: to my mind, it doesn’t have sufficient focus.

Some contributions are regrettably too academic in style, though others are fairly lucid. Above all, however, there is a wealth of material on concrete struggles, political debates and ways of organising, exemplifying the general commitment not only to class analysis but the role of the working class in social transformation.

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Registering Class: neoliberalism and the ruling class

This is part 1 of my 2-part review of 'Registering Class'. It is re-posted from Counterfire.

This year’s Socialist Register, marking fifty years of the intellectual journal, is about class. Overall its mission is to restate the relevance of class – in an intellectual and political climate that rejects class as reductionist, antiquated or irrelevant – and to creatively apply class analysis to contemporary reality.

It is a big, ambitious project. This is the first half, and the second half will follow in the form of the 2015 Socialist Register (every issue since the mid-1980s has been themed, but it is unusual for a topic to be deemed so monumental that it has to be spread over two annual volumes).

The fourteen essays in this volume consider class structure, class consciousness and class struggle; some focus particularly on the contemporary ruling class, others on changes in the composition of the working class, but there is a sense of class relationships running throughout the volume. A key strength is the close attention to developments in class composition, with a sharp sense in many contributions of both the continuities and the changes. The majority of the essays are by US, Canadian and British-based academics.

The whole topic of class is seen as not merely an objective set of economic and social conditions, but as a question of agency and action. How today’s ruling classes effectively impose their will, in the wake of an economic crisis that has shaken their legitimacy, is an important consideration, but so is the deeply unfashionable topic of working-class agency and organisation. As with last year’s volume, The Question of Strategy, Registering Class is shaped by the post-2008 crisis of capitalism and the intellectual and political challenges it has posed.

It can serve as a useful framework for discussing the forces that shape prospects for class struggle in an era of crisis; it is therefore a theoretical resource for those who want, after over thirty years of ruling-class neoliberal offensive, to change the balance of class forces in favour of the working class.

Almost all the essays are, in my view, stimulating and insightful, but I will focus, over two instalments, on five of these contributions which I find particularly fruitful for both grasping the changes in class structure and struggle, and providing guidance for the way ahead. These cover a wide territory and also serve as broadly representative of the volume as a whole, though with something of a North Atlantic bias in the selection (the volume also includes two extremely interesting essays on Brazil).

This article (Part One of this review essay) focuses on two contributions to Registering Class that concern the nature and composition of today’s ruling class. Part Two of this review, to follow next week, examines a number of essays which look at the working class: its changing composition and conditions, its forms of organisation, and debates about such issues as whether there is now a distinct ‘precariat’.

The European capitalist class

Bastiaan Van Apeldoorn’s essay, ‘The European capitalist class and the crisis of its hegemonic project’, starts by noting that, more than anywhere else, Europe has in recent decades experienced a process of ‘transnational capitalist class formation’. A set of institutions and primarily economic relationships has strengthened links between ruling and business elites in different countries. This does not mean that national boundaries no longer matter, but at the highest levels of transnational corporations there has been a development of closer relationships across borders, with more powerful transnational bodies. These elements in European ruling classes have been instrumental in driving through neoliberalism.

Van Apeldoorn argues that in Western Europe there is now ‘a transnational capitalist class – consisting of those who own and control Europe’s largest transnational corporations (TNCs) – that takes the European region as its primary frame of reference and organizes itself to influence the (socio-economic) governance of that region, in particular through the institutions of the European Union (EU)’ (p.190).

I think it is necessary to be careful here. What Van Apeldoorn describes is certainly a core section of the ruling classes of Western Europe, increasingly integrated through the EU, but is far from being the sum total of the ruling classes, which are differentiated and still retain a strong national character.

Nevertheless, the account of this section of Europe’s ruling classes is perceptive and useful, tracing its emergence and growth in influence during the neoliberal era. Leading TNCs have liaised together in order to make European capitalism competitive in relation to US and Japanese firms, and to bend European governments’ policy-making to their interests.

Van Apeldoorn describes this elite group as ‘in the vanguard of the European capitalist class, providing it with internal cohesion, arbitrating rival outlooks and welding them into a coherent project and long-term strategy to advance the general interests of European transnational capital’ (p.191). They have organised themselves in the little-known but influential European Round Table of Industrialists, formed in 1983 and today consisting of around 45 CEOs and chairmen of major corporations centred mainly in the ‘core’ western European states. EU institutions and policies have been the primary focus of this group’s attentions.

This elite group has largely fused the interests of industrial capital and finance capital, with access to global financial markets having ‘increasingly become essential to the globalizing strategies of industrial TNCs’ (p.193). This element of the ruling class has long been in the forefront of establishing neoliberal hegemony in Europe; a largely successful, if uneven, project. Since the Eurozone crisis developed it has played its part in encouraging the entrenchment of divisions between the stronger core states (notably Germany) and the ‘periphery’ countries of southern Europe like Greece, Spain and Portugal.

Van Apeldoorn is aware, however, that there is no entirely cohesive capitalist bloc at the European level, even specifically among the TNC elites. He writes:

‘Even though transnational capitalists have more in common with each other than with their more domestically oriented compatriots, they do not form a fully homogenous group either; the capitalist class generally remains potentially divided along structural lines’ (p.199).

Europe’s ruling classes face serious problems. The whole neoliberal, finance-led accumulation strategy has run aground. There are profound imbalances within the Eurozone. Austerity policies have accentuated some of the problems by cutting demand. Democracy has been further hollowed out, as people have been faced with policies seemingly handed down from distant, anonymous and unaccountable institutions. The state has consequently become more coercive and authoritarian.

Political elites, in this context, pander to widespread insecurity and fear, fostering Islamophobia, nationalism and the scapegoating of immigrants. But this encourages the growth, in many European countries, of populist right-wing and far-right forces which are deeply hostile to the whole European integration project, or in some cases a sort of cynical anti-politics (these are sometimes, but not always, the same thing). The working class, meanwhile, bears the brunt of austerity. In this wider context of European neoliberalism, Britain has, since Thatcher, been firmly in the vanguard. Since the crisis of 2008 it has been among the most dedicated champions of austerity. It is the British situation to which we now turn.

Britain: neoliberalism and crisis

Colin Leys writes specifically about the British ruling class. This is no general or abstract summary of what is meant by a ruling class, but a concrete examination of the distinctive features of today’s British ruling class. Leys writes about its close relationship, and elements of crossover, with a wider European ruling class, but nonetheless insists it is possible to discuss a particular national ruling class. It is differentiated in that some elements have an international outlook and are concerned with global markets (exemplified by the ruling-class elements discussed by Van Apeldoorn), while other elements possess a more nationalist outlook.

This class has, like any ruling class, a tiny core and a somewhat larger periphery which is connected to the core. Leys suggests that between one million and two million people can be regarded as part of this ruling class, so even when broadly defined it is a tiny minority of the population. It has, as a whole, enriched itself throughout the neoliberal period, and its own wealth has remained untouched by the economic crisis.

Leys begins by observing that the British ruling class faces the same basic problem as many other ruling classes: how to ‘resolve the tension between the requirements of global capital and the interests of the population whose votes they need to stay in power’ (p.108). The unelected business chiefs require, after all, a stable elected political wing of the ruling class with a degree of democratic and popular legitimacy.

This dilemma is especially pertinent in Britain because the country is more than usually vulnerable to two kinds of external pressure. US pressure as a result of having since 1945 been effectively a sub-imperial protectorate of America. Secondly, vulnerability to the fluctuations of the global financial markets because the City of London is the world’s leading financial centre: 2010 figures indicated that ‘London handled 18% of the world’s interbank activity, 37% of foreign exchange turnover and 46% of interests rate derivatives turnover’ (p.131).

Leys comments on the intersection between British finance capital and the global economy that:
‘Many British capitalists, and certainly the country’s 2000-plus multi-millionaires and all the shareholders in UK-based transnational companies, own capital in other countries. Conversely, a large part of the capital invested in Britain is owned by foreigners’ (p.109).

Neoliberal policymaking is encouraged – to say the least – by corporate lobbying and threats, credit-rating agencies and international institutions like the IMF, WTO and EU. The British political elite has found it increasingly difficult to retain popular legitimacy as well as enforce corporate and finance-capital interests.

There is, too, a distinctive problem for the British ruling class is the shape of underlying weaknesses in the economy. Manufacturing was massively eroded in the 1980s, while the economy became increasingly dependent on the financial sector. During the 1990s and up to 2008, gross domestic product (GDP) rose significantly, although a rise in inequality meant the benefits were, to put it politely, unevenly distributed. The rise in working-class living standards had much to do with tax credits, a steep increase in household debt and a growth in the number of women working full-time.

In 2008 a banking collapse, with terrible consequences for the economy as a whole, was only averted through massive bank bailouts: ‘the rescue was to be paid for by the British working class in the form of unemployment and the loss of social services and social security’ (p.111). One effect of austerity has been falling consumption, ensuring that the economy flatlines, and the deficit grows. The financial sector has remained unregulated and unreformed, while any serious action on tax evasion, or any other measures to make the rich pay for the crisis, has been emphatically ruled out.

The British ruling class and the power of finance

At a general level Leys defines the ruling class by citing Marx’s point that the class which owns and controls the means of production is also the ruling class politically. This ruling class is not limited to the owners of capital themselves, but includes ‘the monarchy and its functionaries, the judiciary, the police, the military, the security services, the established church hierarchy, the senior civil service, senior doctors and lawyers, etc’ (p.116). Senior figures in such state institutions as police, military and civil service are an integral part of the ruling class, which requires a strong national state that has the appearance of ‘neutrality’, of embodying the ‘national interest’ and hovering above rival class interests, while in fact reflecting and enforcing class rule.

This ruling class has a strong sense of class solidarity and class consciousness, reinforced by ‘public schools’ (i.e. the elite private schools), Oxbridge colleges, gentlemen’s clubs, elite sports (shooting, polo, horse racing etc) and so on. It is geographically concentrated mainly in London – or particular, highly exclusive, parts of it - with strong social ties between its different elements. Leys writes:

‘To be accepted [in the ruling class] you must be seen to be committed to the ruling class’s interests and values, and the indicators of commitment are, precisely, connections, established through private schools, clubs, marriage, social links and spending patterns’ (p.117).

The core of this ruling class is unimaginably rich:

‘in 2013 the thousand richest people in Britain between them owned assets worth £450 billion. In 2012 there were 6,015 High Net Worth Individuals – for which the criterion is having at least 30 million dollars – living in London. These people are the super-rich. A high proportion of them are foreign-born: in 2012-13 foreigners, led by the Russians, bought over half of London’s properties costing more than £2 million’ (p.118).

Leys quotes a Spectator article from 2012:

‘London has effectively left the UK; it belongs instead to a loose international federation of global cities united by their economic dynamism and cosmopolitanism and the people who flit between them … The politicians, civil servants and journalists who make up Britain’s governing class have had their world view shaped by living in the capital in its wealthy satellites. They run the country, but effectively live in another’ (p.118).

This refers to the London (and parts of the commuter-belt home counties) inhabited by a tiny minority of the population, not the working-class London in which millions live. It also evades the question of London’s economic relationship with the wider UK. Nonetheless, it is a perceptive point which highlights the London ruling class’s inter-relationship with  global capital and its distance from the mass of British people, a source of a whole set of tensions.

Extremely conspicuous consumption is an important marker of social status and belonging (to the ruling class) for this elite. The Financial Times caters to this with its weekly ‘How to Spend It’ supplement, which contains almost nothing that could be regarded as affordable to most people. Education is another vital means of establishing ruling-class belonging, and furthering its solidarity of interests, with astronomical fees for the elite private schools.

The City of London, despite being more global than British, is lodged firmly in the heart of government. There are tight ties binding many leading Tory politicians and representatives of the financial elite. In a grotesque mockery of democracy, the City even has a permanent official in the House of Commons – the ‘Remembrancer’ – who has a staff of fifty people scrutinising all parliamentary business and lobbying MPs and government on behalf of the financial sector.

The financial lobby has of course influenced Westminster policy-making for many years, in particular by supporting a regressive tax policy and blocking any moves towards tax reform, or closing loopholes that allow massive tax evasion and avoidance. Donors from this section of the ruling class provide the Tory Party with a high proportion of its funding; it is fair to describe the current Cabinet as a bankers’ government.

Leys concludes his discussion of the City of London and its part in the British ruling class by commenting on the uncritical political acceptance of the City’s elite interests:

‘The class solidarity felt between the leaders of parties and the leaders of the City, reinforced by an inherited class culture of tradition and deference, tends to make any public questioning of the terms seem like vulgar bad manners. The problem of rule then becomes to a significant extent one of how to win elections while imposing on the electorate policies the City needs to maintain its position in the global economy’ (p.126).
 

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