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| Cartoon: Martin Rowson |
There is a strange paradox in contemporary politics. On the one hand inequality has grown over the last three decades or so, with spiralling wealth for the very richest in stark contrast to the reality of unemployment, food banks, zero hour contracts, insecurity and low pay for millions of people.
On the other hand the
subject of class is deeply unfashionable in mainstream politics and media, the
working class rarely referred to in anything other than the past tense. Class
is often seen as no longer relevant – a throwback to a lost era – but even when
the concept is applied to contemporary society it is to suggest a declining or
disappearing working class, perhaps replaced by a division between a burgeoning
middle class and a smaller underclass.
Social
conditions cry out for class analysis, therefore, yet politicians deny the
existence of a working class and instead talk of a ‘squeezed middle’, the media
demonise the poor, and academics and researchers of every stripe search for
alternative categories to those of traditional class-based analysis. The Occupy
movement skilfully drew attention to the chasm between the rich and the rest,
with popular slogans juxtaposing the 1% to 99%, yet an awareness of growing
inequality has not been matched by an understanding of how class relationships
continue to shape society.
Still
less is there any discussion of class struggle, of the clash between classes,
despite the massive inequality being a consequence of a largely successful
ruling class offensive against the working class for the last 35 years. After
decades of either defeats for the organised working class or low levels of
workplace resistance, the notion of class struggle by the working class is
derided as an irrelevant throwback to the 1970s – while class struggle by the
rich and powerful is treated as entirely natural and in the ‘national
interest’.
The rich and the rest
The Sunday
Times’ annual Rich List – begun in the Thatcher era as a celebration of
apparent prosperity, but now an index of truly obscene levels of wealth – indicates
that there are now 104 billionaires in the UK. 72 of them live in London – more
than any other city in the world.
In
1979 the top 1% took 6% of the national income, but now it takes 14%. In 2012
the 100 top chief executives were awarded £425 million between them. This is at
the same time as the majority experience a squeeze on living standards, shaped
by a period of economic crisis since 2008 and the current government’s project
of austerity since 2010. A long-term process of neoliberalism, stretching back
to Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, has been further accentuated by
austerity policies that in the long term will impact disproportionately on the
poorer sections of society.
Thomas
Piketty’s much-discussed book ‘Capital in the Twenty First Century’ has focused
attention on neoliberal capitalism’s trend of growing inequality, predicting a
continuation of the trend. In ‘The Spirit Level’, Richard Wilkinson and Kate
Pickett demonstrated the disastrous social and human effects of inequality,
showing that the most unequal societies are those with the most severe social
problems, for example mental illness. Yet most people are actually quite
unaware of how profoundly unequal our society is: surveys have shown a strong
tendency to underestimate how massive the gulf is between the rich and the
rest.
The
growth in inequality is no accident, but a consequence of political choices
imposed on us through an assertive ruling class offensive designed to
increasingly concentrate wealth and power among those who already possess lots
of those very things.
This has been accompanied by an ideological struggle to
marginalise and ridicule the very concept of class - and certainly the concept
of a working class and of class struggle between the classes. The working class
is tied, in many mainstream accounts, to particular workplaces or groups of
workers – miners, factory workers, shipyard workers, etc – which have suffered
sharp decline. It is frequently , in such accounts, limited exclusively to manual work.
Class: myth and
reality
A
common myth is that of a growing, and affluent (if now somewhat squeezed),
middle class, with a smaller underclass, or rump working class, left behind.
This underclass may be feral and feared or it may be weak and pitied; it may
consist of ‘scroungers’ or the deserving poor. But it is invariably
characterised as a minority and as something quite distinct from any
traditional notion of the working class. Channel 4’s controversial ‘Benefits
Street’ captures the stigmatisation of the modern poor, who are increasingly
blamed for their own predicament and viewed as separate from the vast majority
of society.
The
truth about class remains the same as it has long been: it is a social
relationship based on power. The working class consists of those who have to
work in exchange for pay, subordinate to the power of employers (private or
public), dependent on their own labour to survive.
Class is about exploitation – the
exploitation of the vast majority by a tiny, wealthy and powerful elite.
Workers under capitalism are inherently exploited. Class is not a matter of
lifestyle or identity; it is not limited to particular occupations or types of
work.
Globally
the working class has in fact got bigger and bigger, a process of class formation
closely connected to urbanisation. In this country there continues to be little
social mobility, with class background largely determining a whole set of
experiences and outcomes for people. For all the academic, media or political
attempts to reconceptualise thinking about class – from the ‘multitude’ to the
‘squeezed middle’ to the ‘precariat’ – the reality of a working class,
constituted of the great majority of people, is unmistakeable.
This
is not to say that nothing has changed. The economy has changed and the
composition of the working class has changed with it. As well as the decline of
some sectors and the growth of others, we can note the centrality of women
workers to the economy more than ever before, the role of migrant workers, and
the spread of casualization and precarity. In the last few years there has been
a marked deterioration in pay and conditions for many groups of workers, with
unemployment or the threat of unemployment often used as a method for
disciplining those in work.
It
is sometimes suggested that the working class has declined because working
class identity and consciousness have largely disappeared. The reality is more
complex. In fact surveys suggest large numbers of people still identifying
themselves as working class, however unfashionable and supposedly irrelevant
and outmoded this might be. And working class consciousness has always been
mixed and contradictory, a constant tussle between identifying as part of a
social collective and conservative ideas like racism and nationalism.
Class struggle
In
the current context, the left urgently needs to reinstate class to political
discourse and to articulate a set of class-based arguments, slogans and
demands. We need to express powerful, class-based arguments against austerity. We
face a government in thrall to bankers and the City of London, headed by a
cabinet of millionaires led by an Old Etonian, reeking of privilege and the
arrogance of those ‘born to rule’. The Tories and their media relentlessly
stigmatise and attack those who require social security to keep their head
above water, while allowing tax dodgers to evade serious scrutiny, ripping us
off to the tune of tens of billions of pounds.
Trade
unions have suffered a historic decline: shackled by anti-union laws,
demoralised by defeats in the 1980s, weakened by successive periods of
unemployment and the decline of old industries, shaped by a long period of low
levels of strike action. Yet they retain millions of members and a capacity for
action; we have had glimpses of the potential in mass mobilisations on street
protests and in national strikes, sometimes co-ordinated across unions, in
response to cuts.
The more far-sighted union leaders and activists realise that
‘social movement unionism’ – forging links with communities and campaigning
groups, fighting over a range of political issues, using protests and
campaigning methods alongside strike action -
while striving to recruit to the unions and develop new layers of activists
can reinvigorate the movement. A number of disputes have indicated that groups
previously unorganised, or viewed as precarious, can be active in trade union
struggle.
At
the same time, the People’s Assembly Against Austerity illustrates the scope
for co-ordination and coalition-building to oppose cuts, while creating a space
for left-wing renewal. A new class-based politics, reflecting and involving the
contemporary working class in its diversity, can be developed through renewing
the trade unions, building a more powerful People’s Assembly movement, and
shaping a new left that is rooted in the various struggles and movements of the
class.
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