What Happened to Class?
When I was growing up in the UK, class was an accepted feature of the social world. It wasn’t so much questioned or examined as accepted. You knew where you stood in the hierarchy of classes. Nor was it seen as in some way strange or unfair: it was the way it was.
If you started at the top, there were those people in the Upper Class. These were those refined individuals with distinctive accents who lived in large houses in the best areas of town. It wasn’t clear if they worked so much as occupied ‘important positions’. They also included a rather odd group, the Aristocracy. Aristocrats were hangovers from another era, landowners with titles, who wore strange clothes, hobnobbed with people like the members of the royal family. I suppose we saw them as cherished leftovers.
The middle of this system was complicated even back in the middle of the 20th Century, so let’s quickly go directly to the Lower Classes. The view was they were distinctive in a number of ways. They dressed badly. They spoke with dreadful accents. They swore a lot of the time. The ate badly. Their children were those at school who were always in trouble, and left school as soon as they had reached the end of the compulsory years of education. They lived in poorer parts of town, and many occupied ‘council housing’, which was the term used to describe government owned dwellings, mainly flats and maisonettes, which were provided for a relatively low rent. As was the case with the Upper Class, the Lower Class recognised internal divisions, but these were largely invisible and irrelevant to everyone else.
We now have to turn to the Middle Class. Although it is no longer clearly the case, back then the Middle Class were in the majority. Although the preferred academic classification was more complex, most in the general public agreed recognise three levels in the Middle Class – namely Lower, Middle and Upper. All shared some characteristics, apart from being better than the Working Class, of course! They had better accents, and some even spoke BBC English. Many owned their own homes or were paying for them; these homes were semi-detached or detached dwellings, for the large part. Many, if not most, of the children in this group would continue on into post-compulsory education. Certainly to the end of schooling, and, in many cases, going on to tertiary study.
I suspect it’s the case that for many people today, this reads like the background to a Victorian melodrama, and yes, I have exaggerated a little. However class is even more weird (the in-word at present) for people living in Australia. Class has become so ‘dated’. Perhaps I should have said not so much dated as replaced. Now the crucial factors are hours worked and income. That odd phrase ‘socio-economic status’ has taken centre stage.
Does this suggest that Mark and Engels were wrong in The Communist Manifesto as they previewed the class revolution lurking just around the corner. What was it they said:
But with the development of industry the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more equalized, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois and the resulting commercial crises make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeoisie; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provisions beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there the contest breaks out into riots. … The essential condition for the existence and sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their 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.
Well, perhaps class is still important. Joan C. Williams, of the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, offers a tour guide’s synopsis of the worldviews, anxieties, and political choices of economically precarious white voters in the USA. Although cynicism comes easily to those who see yet another member of the coastal elite class-splaining for the rest of us, her book is full of pithy observations and plausible theories. Her basic message is that white liberal elites and the progressive lawmakers who represent them have abandoned the white working class, scorning their lifestyles and beliefs while failing to offer policy solutions that would truly help them. No surprise then when that group returns the favour by abandoning Democrats in the electoral arena.
Williams defines the working class as Americans with incomes above the bottom one-third and below the top one-fifth ($41,000 to $132,000 in 2015, with median income around $75,000). She also includes an additional 6 percent who have higher incomes but no college degree. We might term such folks the middle class, but since Americans try to elide class differences by calling everyone “middle class,” she settles on calling this middle 53 percent “the working class” Confused? Below the working class on the income spectrum are “the poor” and above are “the professional-managerial elite,” who in addition to having incomes in the top 20 percent also have at least one college graduate per household. This “PME” group has a median income of $173,000.
Williams asserts that members of the professional-managerial elite demonstrate a bad case of “class cluelessness.” We (if you’re reading this review, you’re probably in the PME) think the working class consists of racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-immigrant “deplorables.” We can’t understand why all those people in flyover country refuse to move where the jobs are. Don’t they understand that manufacturing jobs aren’t coming back? Why won’t they take the pink-collar jobs that are growing? Why do they refuse to get the training they need to better their lot—and why don’t they send their kids to college? Why do they cling to their guns and their religion? Above all, why do such people vote for people like Donald Trump? Don’t they want health insurance and a higher minimum wage? And how dare they criticize the poor when so many of them are on government disability or unemployment.
Williams spends most of her short and trenchant book explaining the worldview of the working class: why they believe and behave as they do. And her message for the professional-managerial class is blunt: just as elites ascribe structural reasons for poverty, so too should they recognize the structural factors behind the attitudes and behaviours of the working class. She epitomises the American blunt, sometimes simplistic, but often persuasive analysis of human behaviour. She is more than willing to abandon formulaic approaches, however, and does this deliberately looking at class.
What is this about class cluelessness? Williams solution is weak. She concludes her book by suggesting “Ignoring and belittling the white working class is not a constructive move vis-a-vis people of colour. I suggest a different approach: one that condemns racism and builds an interracial coalition for economic justice”. She goes on to suggest “we need to begin the process of healing the rift between white elites and white workers so that class conflict no longer dominates and distorts our politics. We need to begin now.” She wrote that seven years ago. Perhaps she thinks that it isn’t too late. Well, the need for change is evident, but that need has been with us for a long time.
If we were to travel back some 170 years, we would meet Marx and Engels, completing that call glorious to action, The Communist Manifesto. It is both easy and challenging to read a text like that one. On the one hand, it is a polemic, a broad-based view of history, one which is exciting, comprehensive and persuasive. On the other hand it is a manifesto, a call to arms, a summons to action. It is said that Marx took three years to finalise the wording: however long it took, the result is vibrant language.
On first reading, it is hard not to be swept along, and leave nitty-gritty criticism to one side. Before the section quoted above, there is the opening. Indeed, the first paragraph of Chapter 1 of the manifesto is just one sentence: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” What a claim, and then, in the next paragraph, we are given a second sentence, one which summarises the whole of Chapter 1: “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, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” Marx and Engels know how to capture the attention of their readers!
However, this isn’t the path that Williams is proposing. Williams wants amelioration, but Marx and Engels want revolution: “The modern labourer … instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society. … 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.”
That was the way things appeared back then. Some one hundred and seventy-five years later, we can ask to what extent the analysis has been justified by events. How does Part 1 end? Not with talk about healing a rift. They want the rift to worsen, to reach the point that there is a catastrophic collapse. A collapse that will bring about change, but not ameliorative change, not even radical change, but revolutionary change. “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.”
Is a true communist revolution possible? Once again there are two ways to look at this! The first is to continue to believe that Marx and Engels were correct in their analysis. They saw a situation unfolding over time, and they didn’t set a date when the revolution (their revolution) was going to occur. Events have managed to keep a lid on the proletariat, and progress to an eventual revolution has paused. However, it is still developing, and modern communication media will enable an eventual worldwide revolution even more dramatic than anything Marx and Engels had imagined. There are many critics who hold this view.
The other perspective is to suggest that the complexity of the economy today precludes that kind of proletarian consciousness that a revolution requires. We are well past living in a world in which most workers toil in huge factories. Knowledge work employs far more people than manual labour. Moreover, the existence of an ‘opiate of the masses’ which they were concerned about has transmuted into something more powerful and, in many ways, more invisible than they could have imagined. Today poor workers have smartphones, most people access entertainment at home on television. You don’t need to go to the Coliseum for bread and circuses: what you want is available to you, any time, on electronic devices. The model of society where the proletariat are heading towards an inevitable confrontation with the bourgeoisie and the capitalists is far too simple to encompass current reality.
The Communist Manifesto was an extraordinary document. The first part provided a view of the nature of work and of class differences that remains valid today, albeit more complex than imagined at the time. Part 2 is something of a mixed bag: the abolition of private property, the abolition of the bourgeois family, the abolition of private banking, these are measures that remain on the agenda. However, much else like progressive taxation, free education, and many changes proposed in the nature of work have taken place without revolution. The need for a revolution is clear, but the process to reimagine society needed a lot more work. Correct in some respects, wrong in others, the Manifesto remains an important critique of society.
Sadly, critiques like those of Williams are merely ways to enable continuing exploitation, the process of making conditions appear ‘easier’ that has dominated economies in the West since Marx and Engels wrote their manifesto. Many would argue that the need for revolution is as great as it was back when they were writing. The exploitation of men, women and children in factories was appallingly clear in 1848. In 2024, exploitation is harder to recognise. And so are tits consequences.
Capitalism has proved to be an opiate of the masses, lulling workers into the belief life is good. There’s food in the supermarket, entertainment on television, and innumerable sporting competitions to follow. Of course, if you look closely, the cost of living is eating into worker’s incomes at the same time as that food is stuffed full of harmful additives. There’s entertainment on television, offering a world inaccessible except through looking at the screen, and as unrealistic as any traditional dramas and adventures. And there’s sport: our opiate isn’t races or fights to the death in coliseums but teams of women or men engaging in ‘friendly’ rivalry for a few years, until muscles, backs and brains begin to decline. The heroes of a match or a season are shown in triumph, like the winners of the ‘Grand Final’ travelling through Melbourne in an open-top bus (as long as it isn’t raining). Ten years later, most of those heroes are forgotten. They are today’s illustration of the capitalist system at work: innovate, then push aside any previous successes. Yes, Marx and Engels were right.
