by Chris Harman
On the one hand, there was the development of mega-billion-dollar military hardware systems. The US, by spending even more in absolute terms (although not as a proportion of national output) than at the height of the Cold War in the early 1950s, and by utilising half a century of advances in computer technology, was able to wage wars against Iraq and Serbia which cost it not a single soldier, while killing thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of the other side. It also began to embark down the path of waging its wars by remote control from its own continent, and looking once more to the deployment of ‘Star Wars’ anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems to protect itself against any retaliation.
On the other hand, there was the resort to deadly destructive microsystems. Small states like Israel and impoverished ones like Pakistan found themselves with enough engineering graduates and enough access to modern computing technology to manufacture their own nuclear weapons – pygmy weapons by US standards, but sufficient if the occasion arises to fry alive hundreds of thousands of people in the capital cities of neighbouring countries. For some, at least, the lesson of the US’s deployment of firepower in the Gulf and the Balkans was drawn by the Russian ex-premier Viktor Chernomyrdin: ‘Even the smallest independent states will seek nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles to defend themselves’. 9 For those without the ability to develop those technologies, there were the cruder and cheaper technologies of chemical and biological warfare developed by the Great Powers through the first three-quarters of the century.
In the second half of the twentieth century the apologists for Great Power nuclear programmes argued they would ensure peace through the logic of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction. Neither power, they said, would use its nuclear weapons first because of the certainty of retaliatory destruction if it did so. The Cuban crisis of 1963 showed how close this logic could come to breaking down, and in the 1980s the US threatened to undermine it completely by establishing a ‘first strike capacity’, with the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe and its first abortive attempt to build an ABM system. If the threat was not realised it was because the escalating military costs broke the back of the Soviet economy just as the US found that it did not yet have the technology for a functioning ABM system – and mass protests increased the political costs of European governments keeping cruise missiles on their soil. But the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the renewed building of ABM systems brought the threat back with a vengeance. The world’s greatest power and many of its smaller ones were once again attracted by the logic of ‘first strike’ – responding to a sudden escalation of international tension by using nuclear weapons in the expectation of avoiding retaliation. This in turn increased the likelihood of pre-emptive military strikes, both conventional and nuclear, in a desperate attempt to keep rival powers and lesser powers under control. The barbarism that did not quite materialise in the latter half of the twentieth century becomes a real possibility in the twenty-first. Any perspective on the future which looks at it in terms of several decades rather than just a couple of years must rate the chances of nuclear conflict on some scale as likely, and with it the throwing of whole parts of the world into barbarism proper.
These chances are increased by growing economic instability. A slump on the scale of the 1930s would wreak political havoc in country after country, creating conditions, as in the inter-war years, in which parties could easily rise to power which resorted to military adventures as a way of dealing with domestic problems. The omens are already there with the rise of the far right vote in important countries. Again, once the perspective is one of decades, the possibility of such parties getting access to nuclear weapons becomes a likelihood, unless a class alternative emerges to the present system which sets out to reorganise the whole of society on a different basis. The alternatives of socialism or barbarism are posed more starkly than ever.
A universal class?
The twentieth century was not just a century of horrors. It was also, as we have seen, a century of great upsurges of struggle from below, of working-class-led rebellions against the forces responsible for the horrors: the syndicalist strikes prior to the First World War; the Russian Revolution and the revolts across Europe and the colonial world after that war; the waves of insurgency in Austria, France and Spain in 1934–36, and in France, Italy and Greece in 1943–45; the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; the events of 1968 and after; and the great Polish strikes and occupations of 1980. Only one of those great revolts turned into successful revolution, that in Russia, and that was soon isolated until the life was strangled from it. But the struggles were one of the great determining factors in the history of the century. And, here again, the close of the century did not see an end to the struggles. Deflected class struggle lay behind the collapse of the Eastern bloc. In western Europe the 1990s saw a collapse of the right-wing Berlusconi government in Italy after a wave of strikes; the sudden revival of working-class struggle in France with a month of public strikes and demonstrations in November–December 1995 leading to the eventual collapse of the right-wing Juppé government; a wave of strikes and protests in Germany; a general strike in Denmark; successive strike waves in South Korea; general strikes in Colombia and Ecuador; and the fall of the 32-year-old dictatorship of General Suharto in Indonesia after massive spontaneous demonstrations and riots.
These great social and political upheavals did not prevent superficial and fashionable commentators speaking of an end of class politics. Even Eric Hobsbawm, long regarded as one of Britain’s best-known Marxists, could claim that, while Marx was right when he wrote of the instability of capitalism, he was wrong to see the working class as driven into historic opposition to the system. The proponents of such arguments relied on two sets of evidence – the decline in the proportion of the populations of advanced industrial countries involved in manufacturing, and the relatively small number of people looking to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society in these countries. Neither sort of evidence justified their conclusions.
Certainly, the old bastions of the working class – the miners, the steel workers and the shipyard workers – were much reduced in numbers in countries like Britain, where even the number of car workers at the end of the 1990s was only a half or a third of what it was 30 years previously. But other changes more than compensated for this. In the advanced countries their places were taken by growing numbers of jobs in white-collar employment and the ‘service’ sector, and many jobs which used to be thought of as ‘middle class’ increasingly resembled those in old-style manufacturing industry. Everywhere ‘line managers’ played the same role as the traditional foremen; everywhere the pressure was on people to work harder and show ‘commitment’ by doing unpaid overtime. Assessment procedures became near-universal, with attempts to introduce payment by results even in areas like schoolteaching.
Far from the assembly line disappearing with the relative decline of manufacturing, it spread into new areas. Indeed, in many sectors the distinction between ‘services’ and ‘manufacturing’ no longer made much sense: someone who worked a machine making a computer was categorised as ‘manufacturing’, while someone who performed routine operations in processing its software was categorised as ‘services’; someone who put hamburgers in a can was ‘manufacturing’, someone who put them in a fast food bun, ‘services’. Both sorts of work produced commodities that were sold for a profit, and both were shaped by the continual pressure to create the largest possible profits.
The picture on a world scale was even clearer. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed an enormous spread of wage labour internationally. Textile plants, steel works, oil refineries and car assembly plants were set up in virtually every major country in every continent. Along with them went docks, airports, trucking and rail terminals, modern banking systems, and skyscraper offices. Cities expanded massively as a result. In 1945 there were arguments over whether London or New York was the world’s biggest city. By the end of the century the argument was between Mex
ico City, Bombay and Tokyo. The new industries and cities meant new working classes. By the 1980s, South Korea alone contained more industrial workers than the whole world had when Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto – and it contained millions of non-industrial wage earners as well.
Of course, the world’s workforce was not made up only of wage workers. There remained many hundreds of millions of peasants owning small plots of land in Asia, Africa, parts of Latin America and even parts of eastern Europe. The cities of the Third World contained massive impoverished petty bourgeoisies whose survival depended on the selling of whatever goods and services, however meagre, they could find a market for, and who merged into the even vaster mass of casual labour to be found in the sprawling slums around the cities. The psychology of these groups could be very different from that of the industrial workers. Yet like them, and unlike the middle classes and peasantry of a century ago, their lives were completely tied to the market and dependent on the logic of capital.
Karl Marx once made the distinction between a ‘class in itself’ that has a certain objective position within a society, and a ‘class for itself’ that fights consciously for goals of its own. The working class existed as never before as a class in itself at the end of the twentieth century, with a core of perhaps two billion people, around which there were another two billion or so people whose lives were subject in important ways to the same logic as the core. The real argument about the role of the working class is about if and how it can become a class for itself .
The whole point about Marx’s distinction is that no class that has arisen historically has been able to start off as a class for itself . It grows up within an old order of society, and its members have no experience of any other. They necessarily begin by taking the values of that society for granted. The prejudices of the old society are also, initially at least, the prejudices of the members of the new class. This changes only when they are forced, often by circumstances beyond their own control, to fight for their interests within the old society. Such struggles lead to ties growing up between them, creating loyalties and values different to those of the society. On the terrain created by this, new notions take root about how society can be run, which in turn form part of the framework for subsequent generations’ understanding of the world.
The change in ideas does not occur according to a simple upward linear movement. Just as the struggle of the new class is characterised by small successes and partial defeats, by dramatic advances and sudden, sometimes devastating, setbacks, so there are ebbs and flows in the spread of the transformation of people’s ideas. The history of the rise of the capitalist class provides example after example of such ebbs and flows. At each stage, groups begin to define themselves in ways different to those of the old feudal order, but then try to conciliate with it, making their peace with the pre-capitalist ruling classes, accepting their values and helping to perpetuate their society, leaving it to subsequent generations to have to start afresh the fight for a different sort of society. There must have been many people who felt, during the wars in northern Italy at the end of the fifteenth century, during the religious wars in France a century later, or during the horrors of the Thirty Years War in Bohemia and Germany, that the bourgeoisie would never be able to transform the whole of society in its own image. Yet, by the nineteenth century, economic development had given it such a weight as a class that even the setbacks of 1848 could not halt a seemingly inexorable advance to power.
There is nothing magical about workers under capitalism which enables them to follow some royal road to class consciousness. The society around them is permeated by capitalist values, and they take these values for granted. Even their exploitation is organised through a labour market , where they compete with each other for jobs. As well as the pressure which again and again causes them to combine together against the subordination of their lives to the inhuman logic of capital accumulation, there are also the factors which can all too easily break apart that unity – unemployment, which makes each individual despair of any way of making a livelihood except at the expense of others, or defeats for their organisations which break their sense of solidarity and make them feel that no amount of unity and struggle will ever change things for the better. The growth of new values that are thrown up in periods of successful struggle – embodied in notions of solidarity across national, ethnic and gender divisions – can suddenly be disrupted, distorted or even destroyed. They can also come under considerable pressure during periods of capitalist ‘prosperity’, when sections of workers find they gain from identification with the system: this happens to those who experience upward mobility to become foremen, supervisors or managers; to those who manage to carve out a niche for themselves as small business people; and to those who become, as trade union officials and Labour or social democratic politicians, the professional mediators of capitalist democracy. Such people can be the most outspoken and dynamic personalities in their localities or workplaces, and their adaptation to the system has the effect of blunting the consciousness of class among other workers.
Finally, the process of transformation from the class in itself to the class for itself is continually interrupted by the restructuring and enlargement of the working class as capitalism itself develops. New groups of workers emerge and have to undergo a learning process afresh at each stage of the system. In Britain, for instance, the core of the working class in the 1840s at the time of Chartism was made up of textile workers; in the years before the First World War it consisted of workers in heavy industry like shipyard workers, miners and steel workers; in the early years after the Second World War it was made up of engineering workers. Each had to go through the process again of developing notions already embodied, to some degree, in the consciousness of preceding groups. The differences between old and new workers can be even more pronounced when there is massive and rapid industrialisation, as happened through much of the twentieth century in many countries: the working class which made the revolution of 1917 in Russia was drowned in a vast sea of new workers by the late 1930s; the Italian workers who shook the Mussolini regime in 1943 were diluted by very much larger numbers of workers fresh from the countryside by the 1960s; very few of the tens of millions of China’s workers in the late 1980s were direct descendants of those who waged the great strikes of the 1920s. Yet in each case, after a longer or shorter time lag, new traditions emerged with similarities to the old: the Italian strikes of 1969 and after; the Chinese workers’ support for the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989; the Russian miners’ strikes of 1989 and 1991. In none of these cases did workers show full revolutionary consciousness. But they did, in each case, begin to break with the values and assumptions of the old society. They began to move towards becoming a class for itself, even if they did not complete the journey.
What we witnessed in the last quarter of the twentieth century was not the extinction of the working class or of the development of its consciousness as a class. Instead, we saw the fruits of its massive expansion – an expansion which simultaneously gave it more power to shape society than ever before, but which also forced large sections to have to learn anew what smaller sections had already known three-quarters of a century before. The learning process involved precisely the deflection of the struggle that characterised these years. It left behind a mass of confused and contradictory notions in the minds of tens of millions of people. This was far from the class in itself fully becoming a class for itself. But it was also very far indeed from the disappearance of workers’ struggles as an active shaping force in history.
Writing at the beginning of the century, the future leader of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, commented that, far from the economic struggle of workers automatically leading to revolutionary consciousness, ‘the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology’. This was because ‘that bourgeois ideology is far older in origin than socialist ideology, is far more fully developed and … has
at its disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination’. 10 His famous conclusion was, ‘Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without’. 11 It was a conclusion criticised by Rosa Luxemburg, among others, and Lenin himself admitted later that he had underrated the role of workers in developing socialist ideas. 12 But he rightly focused on a point taken up and developed a quarter of a century later by the often misunderstood Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci.
Gramsci pointed out that the members of a class are usually exposed to conflicting views of the world – those that arise out of the everyday practice of existing society and those that arise in so far as the class (or a section of it) has experience of fighting to transform that society. As a result, anyone’s personality ‘is made up in a queer way. It contains elements of the caveman and principles of the most modern advanced learning, shabby prejudices of all past historical phases and intuitions of a future philosophy of the human race united all over the world’. 13 These contradictory elements are combined in different ways among different individuals and groups. Some are trapped almost completely within the views characteristic of existing society, and some have gone a very long way into breaking from these, but most are stuck somewhere in the middle, pulled first one way then another under the impact of those with more homogenous views at either extreme. The concrete action of a class at any point in history depends on which of the ‘extremes’ is most successful in attracting the middle group as social upheavals (wars, economic crises, strikes and civil wars) open it up to new ideas. The degree to which a class in itself becomes a class for itself depends not only on material changes in the world around it, but also on the formation of rival parties within it.
This was also shown in the rise of capitalism. The ‘great transition’ was not just a result of objective economic factors. It also depended upon successive attempts by sections of the new burgher or bourgeois classes to organise themselves around views of the world very different to those of the old order – and of other sections to work with representatives of the old order to subvert such organisation. It is the history of movements of revolt or reform in the eighth-century Islamic Empire and the eleventh-century Chinese Empire, and of the suppression of those movements; of the movements of the Renaissance and Reformation, and of the succumbing in Italy, Germany and France of those movements to the old order; of the victories of the Dutch and English revolutions, and of the horrific impasse of the Thirty Years War; of the Enlightenment, and of the obscurantist reaction against the Enlightenment; of the struggle of the French Assembly against its king, and of the Jacobins against the Girondins. The transition was not achieved in one great leap, and nor was it a result of slow, piecemeal change. It depended on the formation, defeat and reformation of parties built around a new developing worldview over several hundred years.
