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 bras
s 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
Nor should one forget the enormous slum population of the world, growing at an extraordinarily fast rate. If slum dwellers do not already form a majority of the global urban population, they soon will. These men and women are not part of the working class in the classical sense of the term, but neither do they fall entirely outside the productive process. They tend rather to drift in and out of it, working typically in low-paid, unskilled, unprotected casual services without contracts, rights, regulations or bargaining power. They include hawkers, hustlers, garment workers, food and drink sellers, prostitutes, child labourers, rickshaw pullers, domestic servants and small-time self-employed entrepreneurs. Marx himself distinguishes between different layers of the unemployed; and what he has to say about the ''floating'' unemployed or casual labourer of his own day, who count for him as part of the working class, sounds very similar to the condition of many of today's slum dwellers. If they are not routinely exploited, they are certainly economically oppressed; and taken together they form the fastest growing social group on earth. If they can be easy fodder for right-wing religious movements, they can also muster some impressive acts of political resistance. In Latin America, this informal economy now employs over half the workforce. They form an informal proletariat which has shown itself well capable of political organisation; and if they were to revolt against their dire conditions, there is no doubt the world capitalist system would be shaken to its roots.
Marx held that the concentration of working people in factories was a precondition of their political emancipation. By bringing workers physically together for its own self-interested purposes, capitalism created the conditions in which they could organise themselves politically, which was not quite what the system's rulers had in mind. Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism. Those who dwell in the slums of the world's megacities are not organised at the point of production, but there is no reason to suppose that this is the only place where the wretched of the earth can conspire to transform their situation. Like the classical proletariat, they exist as a collective, have the strongest possible interest in the passing of the present world order, and have nothing to lose but their chains.12
The demise of the working class, then, has been much exaggerated. There are those who speak of a shift in radical circles away from class to race, gender and postcolonialism. We shall be examining this a little later. In the meantime, we should note that only those for whom class is a matter of frock-coated factory owners and boiler-suited workers could embrace such a simpleminded notion. Convinced that class is as dead as the Cold War, they turn instead to culture, identity, ethnicity and sexuality. In today's world, however, these things are as interwoven with social class as they ever were.
EIGHT
Marxists are advocates of violent political action. They reject a sensible course of moderate, piecemeal reform and opt instead for the bloodstained chaos of revolution. A small band of insurrectionists will rise up, overthrow the state and impose its will on the majority. This is one of several senses in which Marxism and democracy are at daggers drawn. Because they despise morality as mere ideology, Marxists are not especially troubled by the mayhem their politics would unleash on the population. The end justifies the means, however many lives may be lost in the process.
The idea of revolution usually evokes images of violence and chaos. In this, it can be contrasted with social reform, which we tend to think of as peaceful, moderate and gradual. This, however, is a false opposition. Many reforms have been anything but peaceful. Think of the United States civil rights movement, which was far from revolutionary yet which involved death, beatings, lynchings and brutal repression. In the colonial-dominated Latin America of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, every attempt at liberal reform sparked off violent social conflict.
Some revolutions, by contrast, have been relatively peaceful. There are velvet revolutions as well as violent ones. Not many people died in the Dublin uprising of 1916, which was to result in partial independence for Ireland. Surprisingly little blood was spilt in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In fact, the actual takeover of key points in Moscow was accomplished without a shot being fired. The government, in the words of Isaac Deutscher, "was elbowed out of existence by a slight push,''1 so overwhelming was the support of the common people for the insurgents. When the Soviet system fell over seventy years later, this sprawling landmass with a ferocious history of conflict collapsed without much more bloodshed than had occurred on the day of its foundation.
It is true that a bloody civil war followed hard on the heels of the Bolshevik revolution. But this was because the new social order came under savage attack from right-wing forces as well as foreign invaders. British and French forces backed the counterrevolutionary White forces to the hilt.
For Marxism, a revolution is not characterized by how much violence it involves. Nor is it a total upheaval. Russia did not wake up on the morning after the Bolshevik revolution to find all market relations abolished and all industry publicly owned. On the contrary, markets and private property survived for a considerable time after the Bolshevik seizure of power, and for the most part the Bolsheviks approached their dismantling in gradualist spirit. The left wing of the party took a similar line with the peasantry. There was no question of driving them into collective farms by force; instead, the process was to be gradual and consensual.
Revolutions are usually a long time in the brewing, and may take centuries to achieve their goals. The middle classes of Europe did not abolish feudalism overnight. Seizing political power is a short-term affair; transforming the customs, institutions and habits of feeling of a society takes a great deal longer. You can socialise industry by government decree, but legislation alone cannot produce men and women who feel and behave differently from their grandparents. That involves a lengthy process of education and cultural change.
Those who doubt that such change is possible should take a long hard look at themselves. For we in modern Britain are ourselves the products of a long revolution, one which came to a head in the seventeenth century; and the chief sign of its success is that most of us are completely unaware of the fact. Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves. In doing so, they make the situation they struggled to bring about seem entirely natural. In this, they are a bit like childbirth. To operate as "normal" human beings, we have to forget the anguish and terror of our births. Origins are usually traumatic, whether of individuals or political states. Marx reminds us in Capital that the modern British state, built on the intensive exploitation of peasants-turned-proletarians, came into existence dripping blood and dirt from every pore. This is one reason why he would have been horrified to observe Stalin's forced urbanization of the Russian peasantry. Most political s
tates came about through revolution, invasion, occupation, usurpation or (in the case of societies like the United States) extermination. Successful states are those that have managed to wipe this bloody history from the minds of their citizens. States whose unjust origins are too recent for this to be possible—Israel and Northern Ireland, for example—are likely to be plagued with political conflict.
If we ourselves are the products of a supremely successful revolution, then this in itself is an answer to the conservative charge that all revolutions end up by failing, or reverting to how things were before, or making things a thousand times worse, or eating up their own children. Perhaps I missed the announcement in the newspapers, but France does not seem to have reinstated the feudal aristocracy in government, or Germany the landowning Junkers. Britain, it is true, has more feudal remnants than most modern nations, from the House of Lords to Black Rod, but this is largely because they prove useful to the ruling middle classes. Like the monarchy, they generate the kind of mystique that is supposed to keep the mass of the people suitably daunted and deferential. That most British people do not see Prince Andrew as exuding a seductive air of mystery and enigma suggests that there may be more reliable ways of propping up your power.
Most people in the West at present would no doubt declare themselves opposed to revolution. What this probably means is that they are against some revolutions and in favour of others. Other people's revolutions, like other people's food in restaurants, are usually more attractive than one's own. Most of these people would doubtless approve of the revolution that unseated British power in America at the end of the eighteenth century, or the fact that colonized nations from Ireland and India to Kenya and Malaysia finally won their independence. It is unlikely that many of them wept bitter tears over the fall of the Soviet bloc. Slave uprisings from Spartacus to the southern states of America are likely to meet with their approval. Yet all these insurrections involved vio-lence—in some cases, more violence than the Bolshevik revolution did. So would it not be more honest to come clean and confess that it is socialist revolution one objects to, not revolution itself?
Why Marx Was Right Page 14
