Contesting Class Globally 

 

David Bedggood, Sociology, University of Auckland, New Zealand

 

 

The centrality of class

 

The concept of social class is a central one in sociology. Sociologists are sometimes accused of inventing the working class (presumably so they can then pursue careers to escape it). Its relevance is to explain the social, as opposed to psychological or biological, causes of persistent and resistant social inequality. Like sociology itself however, class is open to different interpretations and is a highly contested concept. Many, like Pakulski and Waters speak of the ‘death of class’ as a concept or as a social reality (1996). Hardt and Negri insist that class has been re-born as the ‘Multitude’ (2000, 2004). Others contest the death notice as premature. For bell hooks, in her book Where we Stand: Class Matters, “Class is the elephant in the room” (2000). And Erik Olin Wright, titles one of his books Class Counts (1997).

 

In this chapter I will argue that those who cannot see the ‘class elephant’ are like the person who feels part of an elephant in the dark.  My purpose is to show that social classes are alive and swinging. As the elephant picks us up and sets off at pace, it becomes obvious that social class is not just a poxy academic curiosity, but a living, moving force that can jump national borders. When widening global gaps between rich and poor cannot be attributed to genetics, non-rational values, or mass psychology, then class is left as the single most powerful explanation of its persistent and resistant inequality.[1]

 

Like the elephant, class has a long memory and spans several centuries and the life of sociology itself. We should therefore look first at the two broad historical approaches to class within sociology (Wright, 2004). The first is that of Marxists who define the nature of modern capitalist society in terms of social class – it is all important – and their theory stands or falls with class. The second is that of Weberians who recognise the existence of class inequality in the market without making it a fundamental or necessary feature of modern society.

 

This chapter will briefly outline the main elements of each; their basic concepts, the research evidence they draw upon, and their policy outcomes. We can then practically test the explanatory power of both theories by selecting countries where class can be isolated from other important competing causes. I will conclude that the theory that understands classes as relations of production can account for those ‘complex and changing’ political and cultural practices of inequality more efficiently and practically than its rivals, allowing the chastened sociologist to at least hang on to the rampaging elephant if not bring it to a halt. 

 

 

Marx’s production relations

 

Karl Marx defined capitalist society as a relationship between two social classes – wage-labour and capital. His interest in class was sparked by the outrage he felt at the treatment of poor peasants denied firewood by wealthy landowners. For him class constituted the essence of capitalism since it involved the systematic exploitation of wage-labour and the expropriation of surplus-value by capital. Marx distinguished capitalist class society from pre-capitalist society, both classless (primitive communism) and class (slave society, feudalism, and the oriental mode of production) and post-capitalist classless communist society (Marx, 1983:502-6; Miles, 1987:19-24).

 

Arising out of this analysis, capitalist society is seen as the most historically advanced mode of production capable of developing the forces of production to the point where a classless socialist society can replace it. However, this process was uneven, and the classes of earlier modes were not always extinguished and sometimes remained ‘articulated’ to capitalist class relations in what has been called the ‘combined and uneven development’ of capitalism. This was true of slave or indentured labour, and of tribal, peasant or tributary forms of production, all of which become incorporated as unfree labour rather than as free wage-labour (Miles, 1987:313-34). Today, peasant labour, unpaid domestic labour, slave and indentured labour, as well as ‘self-employed’ and ‘temping’ remain lucrative sources of unfree labour, alongside wage labour (Cook, 2000).

 

As well as constituting capitalism, the wage workers and capitalist employers are involved in constant struggle over the rate of exploitation. For Marx, class struggle was the ‘motor of history’ as the demands of workers for better wages and conditions forced capitalists to resort use the state and law to defend their ‘private property, to pass anti-union legislation and employ ‘management’ techniques to contain the working class. When this failed, employers would use ‘divide and rule’ tactics, hiring non-union labour, migrant workers and private armies to break the power of unions. Most importantly employers were driven to use new technology to increase labour productivity so as to maintain their profits. This had the powerful effect of reducing labour time and the number of workers, creating a pool of unemployed and an industrial reserve army of labour (IRAL) further driving down wages (Marx, 1976:781-94).

 

However, far from asserting that a necessary transition from a working class ‘in’ itself to a working class ‘for’ itself could arise out of this often brutal struggle, Marx argued that ‘class consciousness’ would arise only as a result of the intervention of those who understood his scientific critique of capitalism.[2] The separation of workers from the ownership of the means of production hid from view the actual process of exploitation. Workers did not see that their surplus-labour was expropriated to re-appear as the value of commodities owned by the employers.  Even in the heat of the class war, this productive relation was ‘inverted’ in the minds of both workers’ and employers as an ongoing battle over a ‘fair’ division between wages and profits. Marx called this inversion ‘commodity fetishism’ because it falsely represented value as inherent in commodities.  It resulted in a  ‘false consciousness’ in which workers saw themselves as being in a potentially equal exchange relationship, rather than an inherently unequal production relationship, with the capitalists (Marx, 1976:163-77).

 

 

Neo-Marxism

 

It didn’t take long for Marx’s prediction of socialist revolution to be falsified by events.  Despite the growth of the proletariat during the 19^th century –in particular the rise of strong trades unions and social democratic and labour parties –workers did not seem to want to turn strikes into revolutions. Where workers did revolt in Russia in 1917, this did not fit Marx’s preconditions of a developed industrial society and mass working class. Russia was overwhelmingly a peasant society and capitalism was in its infancy. More tellingly, in Germany, where capitalism was advanced and a mass working class did exist, workers revolutionary demands were contained within a democratic capitalist republic well short of socialist revolution.[3]

 

Neo-Marxists drew the conclusion that economic interests alone were not sufficient to turn a working class ‘in’ itself, into a working class ‘for’ itself.  Workers lacked a revolutionary class consciousness. Were there political and cultural factors that acted ‘independently’ of the economy to contain workers’ consciousness? Rejecting Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, Antonio Gramsci and the German Frankfurt school highlighted the dominance of capitalist ideology in neutralising class consciousness. Moreover, perhaps the proletariat was no longer the historic agent of socialism.[4] The working class appeared to be in decline while the ‘middle class’ was growing. Perhaps the workers needed the guidance of middle class socialist intellectuals or ‘new true socialists’? (Meiksins Wood, 1986:1-11).  Over the course of the 20^th century, the apparent weight of such evidence saw Marx’s original class analysis revised into the contemporary neo-Marxist approaches of sociologists such as Eric Olin Wright and Pierre Bourdieu today which try to marry Marx and Weber. [5]

 

Some went so far as to abandon most of Marx’s class analysis altogether and become ‘post-Marxist’. For example, Nicos Poulantzas and Ernest Laclau substituted economic with political and ideological ‘determinism’ in the formation of classes (Meiksins Wood, 1986: 34 passim, 47 passim). The main message was “you’re only in a class if you think you are and act like it, in particular voting for your labour or socialist (communist) party”. This redefined Marxist social relations as individual relations or ‘lifestyle classes’ compatible with mainstream neo-Weberian distributional class analysis (Carchedi, 1987:120). In order to evaluate the progeny of this marriage of convenience with Weberians it is necessary to review the second main strand of class analysis.

 

 

Weber’s market relations

 

Max Weber’s concept of capitalism was of that of market society in which individual actors exchanged commodities. Weber was himself a leading economic historian and the centre of an influential circle of academics and intellectuals. He viewed economic classes in terms of individuals such as himself owning more economic ‘assets’ than others. Individuals also differed according to their access to political power (party) and according to their ability to consume (status). Unlike Marx, however, Weber did not think that individuals were assigned to classes as constitutive of capitalism, since they could change their class, status and party positions. Thus, rather than combining together in classes to bring about change in society, Weber saw individuals acting to change their position in society (social mobility).

 

What motivated individuals to try to increase their market share was their rationality. That is, their ability to act as rational actors in the market in buying and selling commodities to improve their asset values. For Weber the capitalist market represented a progressive shift from non-rational society to a rational society where progress was measured by an increasingly efficient division of labour. The economic theory that underpinned this view was the late nineteenth century marginalist economics that held that the value of commodities was determined by supply and demand (Clarke, 1982:16). The capacity of individuals to act rationally in the market was given by their ability to maximise their assets in the exchange process and determine their share of the distribution of wealth. For this reason, he regarded socialism as a return to the non-market irrationality of ‘serfdom’ (Gerth and Mills, 1970:49).

 

For Weber then, economic classes result from individuals’ ability to use their knowledge and power in the market to act rationally to determine their relative share of ‘assets’ or wealth. The capitalists did not combine as a class to exploit wage-labour either in production or in exchange, but rather used their ability to control production, respond to demand etc in order to increase their market share. Workers on the other hand had little power to increase their market share when their only asset was their labour-power. Nevertheless capitalists could make bad decisions and go bankrupt, and workers could use their skills and their combined political power to improve their market share. Bargaining over their respective shares of the national wealth then becomes the main economic activity of all actors. Market shares increasingly become determined by relative political power in the formation of ‘revenue; or ‘rent’ classes.

 

 

Neo-Weberians

 

Weber’s theory has proven much more popular than Marx’s among sociologists (and the ruling class if not the working class) because it seemed to explain not only the existence of economic classes, and the relative autonomy of economics and politics, but also allowed for individuals to escape particular classes and exercise choice (voluntarist action) without the need to overthrow capitalist society. It therefore seemed to fit better with the actual behaviour of the majority of workers who struggled to improve their living standards and did not develop a revolutionary class consciousness.

 

Not surprisingly, neo-Weberians from Frank Parkin to Tony Giddens claim that capitalism has outgrown the 19^th and early 20^th century economic scarcity that required classes to compete for zero-sum shares in the national wealth. Today it has become a global, post-scarcity, win-win society in which all can improve their shares of a growing income pool.  The persistence of barriers to upward mobility between rent classes within the urbanised working class can be explained by relative market capacity i.e. occupations with scarce skills or other ‘social capital’ (e.g. status and power) that enable them to improve or maintain their social advantage at the expense of other occupations (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992:pp.366-8; 394-6).

 

Key to rent-maximisation is the social status factors that act as barriers to equality. Bourdieu has developed a post-Weberian theory of the reproduction of rent classes in which the dominant classes can protect their wealth and power by the continuous cultural subordination of ‘lower classes’. Bourdieu calls this market capacity ‘cultural capital’ which deprives the lower orders of the requisite skills and knowledge to compete equally in the market, and which is reproduced by the ‘symbolic violence’ of the male elite (2001:1-4). Similarly, for Bourdieu, nationalism acts as a cultural barrier to inclusion when national identity is defined against the ‘outsider’ or ‘other’. Racism is institutionalised by national elites as ‘symbolic capital’ to demonise migrant workers in particular limiting their citizenship rights and so undermine class solidarity between nationals and ‘aliens’ (1998:17).

 

For neo-Weberians, given this persistence of social, national and cultural barriers, patterns of social mobility can reflect a simultaneous upward movement of individuals into skilled occupations and a downward mobility of individuals into a casualised workforce and a residual marginalised underclass that has yet to be included in the Giddens-type post-scarcity society. However, if individuals act responsibly to minimise risk and maximise opportunity in the marketplace, those with relatively less market capacity can improve their positions and overcome most disadvantage due to class, status or party positions (Giddens, 1998:110-28 ). In the long run, the development of the rationalisation of the market in post-capitalist society will eliminate social classes.  On the face of it, this neo-Weberian (some would say post-Weberian) class theory appears capable of explaining classes in modern or post-modern capitalist society in all their concrete complexity (Lee and Turner, 1996; see also Crompton, 1998 and Savage 2000).

 

 

Marx-Weber hybrids

 

Neo-Marxists and post-Marxists, have accepted at face value the evidence that the proletariat has declined relative to a ‘new middle class’ and has ceased to be the universal class agent of revolution. This has caused them to retreat into alliances with neo-Weberians in the hope of keeping social class alive to explain the reproduction of inequalities. As a result they have made major concessions to neo-Weberian distributional analysis of rent classes based on occupations, status and political parties.

 

For example, Nicos Poulantzas accepted the neo-Weberian view that the proletariat defined as comprising ‘blue-collar’ workers has shrunk into insignificance, and that white collar workers can be re-defined as ‘middle class’ on the basis of their political (party) affiliations (Meiksins Wood, 1986:25-46). Erik Olin Wright, also trying to explain the persistence of a ‘middle class’, resorted to the Weberian idea of power (domination) to distinguish those who are paid wages to manage the labour process from the proletariat. In both cases, the ‘new middle class’ is not defined by its relation to the means of production, but by capacity for political power (Carchedi, 1987:112-31). 

 

While both writers  argue that the working class still has an interest in transforming capitalism, in Poulantzas case, this is largely academic as it is  middle class intellectuals alone who can act to change society. For Wright however, middle class power is used on behalf of capital against the working class. Wright suggests the classic Marxist view, that the ‘contradictory’ social position of the petty bourgeoisie is a ‘treacherous’ ally in the transition to socialism, applies equally to the ‘new middle class’.

 

Yet there are obvious dangers in these concessions, however minor. It isn’t merely a matter, of slotting Weberian concepts into a Marxist theory like diet supplements. For example, Bourdieu takes the watered-down neo-Marxism of Poulantzas, and adds a neo-Weberian theory of the reproduction of class power (Callinicos, 1999). The result is a theory of class formation that operates at the level of distribution. This theory calls for autonomous ‘collective intellectuals’ to campaign on behalf of those social groups excluded by social elites to correct the unequal distribution of power and wealth.[6] There are at least two important objections to such hybrid theories of class formation.

 

 

Objection 1: Exploitation vs. ‘life chances’

 

First, for Marx as we have seen, classes are defined by their relation to the means of production, not by market share (‘life chances’). There is a fundamental distinction between the two levels of analysis, that of production and that of exchange. For Marxists the pre-occupation with ‘occupation’ reflects a one-sided, technical, conception of production. Occupations within a division of labour result from the increasing technical development of the forces of production in producing use-values i.e. the ‘usefulness’ of a commodity in satisfying a need. On the whole this is a progressive development over time which results from labour becoming more productive.  But this ignores the fact that all of these occupations are made up of workers exploited by capital during production and circulation, so that the scientist, engineer, machine operator, truck driver and retail worker are all, despite their occupational and skill differentials, members of the exploited proletariat.

 

Thus different skill and power levels in negotiating market shares of income (‘life chances’) take non-exploitative production relations as a given. However, rent seeking by different occupations redistributes value that is already produced and expropriated during production.  Whatever the share of wages, profits and rents arrived at by means of unequal exchange or redistribution in the market, this has no direct bearing on the rate of exploitation. Marx pointed out the highest paid skilled workers may be the most exploited. That is why Marx ‘averaged’ the whole range of skills of different occupations as the ‘collective’ or ‘global’ worker (1976:945). Indeed, Marx’s only specific references to ‘classes’ was to clearly reject class analysis at the level of distribution,   i.e. revenue classes.[7]  Therefore, from the Marxist standpoint, any conclusion that modern capitalism has been transformed into post-capitalism by the formation of occupational ‘classes’ contesting the distribution of income, is fundamentally non-Marxist and evidence of the hegemonic fetishised ideology of capital which presents production relations as inverted exchange or distribution relations.

 

 

Objection 2: Fetishism of the Intellectuals

 

The second objection to hybridised classes is the role played by intellectuals privileging distributional class analysis.  The ‘fetishised’ ideology that workers carry around in their heads of their exchange relation to capital accounts for their reluctance to overthrow capitalism when they can improve their market shares. For Marx class consciousness required the intervention of intellectuals able to fuse Marxist science with working class practice. By reproducing the fetishism of bourgeois ideology, neo-Weberian and neo-Marxist class analysis simply dresses up and feeds back the sanitised, inverted ideology of capitalism as common sense and natural.

 

For post-Marxists there is a further retreat from Marx to the neo-classical notion of class as an association of individuals competing for market share (‘life chances’). Hence the convergence of post-Marxists with neo-Weberian market level analysis around ‘rent classes’ is complete. Now that the idea that exploitation results from unequal exchange or an unfair distribution of revenue by political and cultural elites (multiplied by gender, ethnic, national etc. fractions and sub-fractions)  the way is opened for the abandonment of the full power of Marx’s concept of class struggle and the substitution of…social movements.

 

 

Social Movements

 

The typical offspring of hybrid theories of class formation that substitute actual groups of individuals at the level of exchange or distribution (rent classes) for social relations of production are social movements (Crompton, 1998:18-19).   Since the problem of inequality is defined at the level of distribution (or exchange) the solution requires the mobilisation of disadvantaged groups (categorised by class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, indigeneity etc) ideologically and politically into social movements to contest and remedy the causes of inequality.

 

The ideological agenda for social movements is usually provided by one or other set of petty bourgeois intellectuals who speak for each movement. The archetypal social movement is the women’s movement. Marxist, socialist, radical and liberal feminists contested the leadership of this movement in the 1960s and 1970s.   Victory went to the liberal feminists whose program was to challenge sexist ideology as a set of attitudes blocking gender equality. Radical views as to the historic universality of patriarchy, and Marxist/Socialist conceptions of gender as a social relation were subordinated in the movement (Ebert, 1996).

 

Hence liberal feminism could morph easily into post-feminism when a minority of middle class women gained access into top jobs and improved their market share. Yet the vast majority of women continued to be disadvantaged and oppressed in the casualised labour market and/or stigmatised as welfare dependents. If ever a social movement did not represent a successful transfer of power and wealth to a socially excluded majority, this was it! While other social movements have made marginal gains, for example in the recognition of rights (gay and lesbian, black, immigrant, indigenous rights etc) and in equalising market shares (upward mobility), they all exhibit the same fate as the women’s movement –they have not seen major advances in the social position of minorities and remain vulnerable to reactionary backlashes because they have not been prepared to fight to transform social relations (Cregan, 2002).

 

A recent attempt to boost the capacity of social movements to bring about global change is that of Hardt and Negri in Empire and Multitude (2000; 2004).  The multitude is not the unity of oppressed social classes, but the association of unique (particularistic) social movements into a ‘movement of movements’ capable of taking on the Empire of capitalism. For Hardt and Negri migrants are the exemplary social movement capable of liberating themselves from the appeals of nationalism and creating a global opposition. Yet migrant workers face the hostility not only of national elites but of the reactionary mobilisation of working class elements fearful of competition for jobs, housing, as well as alien cultural symbols like headscarves. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the fear of Muslims as an ‘out-group’ has grown rapidly overriding concerns of class, status and power. However, far from proof that nationalism remains a particularistic social relation disqualifying class, it is the particularistic interests of the ruling class claiming to represent all classes in the national interest that are defended by appeals to patriotism.

 

If the best that hybrid theories can do is to generate world-wide social movements as the agents of equality ‘within’ global capitalism but with no common class interest grounded in exploitation, how do they stand up to the test of the actual events? If they have failed to eliminate inequality perhaps this because they are not sufficiently ‘anti-capitalist’ and are not directed at transforming capitalist social relations? We can look at three exemplary cases where race, gender, immaterial labour, nationality and religion compete with social class to explain the persistence of social inequality and see how they all rate in the explanatory stakes.

 

 

Lands of White Settlement: USA, Australia and New Zealand

 

These European settler states allow us to pit the explanatory power of race and gender relations against class relations. The myth is that USA, Australia and New Zealand are relatively open, fluid societies comparatively free of class barriers. The evidence does not support this (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1992:324). Nevertheless, given the visibility of race and gender inequality, they tend to take on more prominence than class inequality in such societies (bell hooks, 2000:7). 

 

For example, in the US the legacy of slavery and the disproportionate numbers of Blacks and Latinos in the working class facilitated divide and rule tactics by employers using race against class (Bergquist, 1996:37; Weinberg, 2003:168). Similarly, New Zealand Maori and Australian Aboriginals tend to be concentrated as blue-collar workers or members of the IRAL causing racist divisions which cut across class identity (Poata-Smith, 2004; Armstrong, 1996:67). Similarly, in much of the literature gender is seen as more or less independent of class (Fraser, 1997:18; James and Saville Smith, 1994:6; Stone, 1996:79-80).  This has the effect of relegating class to one of a number of  ‘social movements’ betraying a distributional or exchange analysis. Yet even at this level, multifactoral studies in these countries show that once gender and race are controlled for, occupational class remains a major determinant of ‘life chances’ and ‘rent-seeking’ capacity (Erikson and Goldthorpe, 1996:378). Further, if we look for the underlying cause of this market capacity we see it is the polarisation of wage-labour and capital, the proletarian nature of all waged or salaried occupations, and the formation of an IRAL that strikes us as the major determinant of class, race and gender inequality.[8]

 

Therefore, the structural causation of class needs to be located at a deeper level than socio-economic status or occupation. For Marxists, race and gender are effects of the history of class relations in these White-Settler societies. This does not mean, however that there are no reciprocal  effects on class.  But in none of these societies did race and gender divisions exist before colonisation. Gender and racial oppression originated as the consequence of capitalist conquest, the articulation of lineage, slave and domestic modes into family farming and the reserve army of labour, so that became ‘surrogates’ or ‘forms’ of class relations (Miles, 1987:44).

 

Perhaps it is no accident that both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were assassinated at the point when they broadened their struggle for racial justice and equality into a class struggle across the racial divide (Cohen, 2003:383).  Class differentiation of ethnic groups in the working class opens up opportunities for cross-ethnic class alliances (Linkon and Russo, 2001:318-21; Munck (2004, 1-14). African-American and Maori bourgeois have taken most of the increased share of the equal opportunity stakes of the Great Society in the US and Treaty Settlement process in NZ at the expense of the bulk of working class African Americans and Maori who remain concentrated in the working class and IRAL(hooks, 2000:89-100; Rata, 2003). 

 

In the case of gender, the articulation of the domestic mode to capitalism still best explains the chronic social position of women as unpaid domestic workers, as casualised wage workers with dependent children or as stigmatised single mothers on welfare. That is, the gendered social relations of the family articulate to those of capitalism in such a way that women’s unpaid labour is an important subsidy to capital. That in turn accounts best for the disadvantage of women in the labour market where discrimination and inequality remain strong. It is the combined effect of domestic ‘slavery’ and market discrimination that best explains what is called the ‘feminisation of poverty’ (Bedggood, 2002).

 

Thus in these highly developed European settler societies where social class is seen to be almost ‘dead’,  the class ‘surrogates’ of  race and gender remain powerful determinates of ‘life chances’. The most incisive explanation of this reality reveals how the pre-capitalist social relations of tribal, tributary, slave or domestic production ‘survive’ alongside capitalist social relations like the dead hand of the past on the free labour of the living. Overcoming this legacy and building a united multi-national working class is the task facing labour organisation today (Luthje and Scherrer, 2001; Bonefeld, 2002)

 

 

 

 

 

The ‘Multitude’ versus the proletariat:  Argentina

 

If the ‘social movement’ approach is taken to its logical conclusion with arrive at Negri’s concept of the ‘multitude’ as the ‘movement of movements’.  Negri replaces classic Marxist class analysis and its key concept of the expropriation of material value with a theory of the immaterial production of bodies ‘exploited’ (in every sense) by capital but united as the multitude opposed to Empire – i.e. the concentrated wealth and power of global capital (Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004). This enables Negri to redefine class as autonomous of social relations of production.

 

Negri says that in Argentina, the unemployed and petty bourgeois or ‘middle class’ have replaced the proletariat as the social agent of change (Negri and Cocco, 2000). By expanding the definition of ‘exploitation’ by capital to the ‘body’, Negri not only dissolves the proletariat into the middle class but also into the unemployed. Negri thinks that the working class disappears when jobs disappear, leaving the unemployed and self-employed as the vanguard of the multitude. 

 

Yet as I have argued, if capitalism has created an industrial reserve army of labour which functions as part of the labour market holding down the value of labour-power, then this must include all those without other means of subsistence competing to sell their labour-power.  Therefore, the demands of the unemployed piquetero movement in Argentina for jobs and living welfare payments are no different from the campaigns of the oppressed minorities in the reserve army of the developed capitalist economies to defend and improve welfare standards.  They are not members of an ‘underclass’ actively choosing not to enter the labour market, but members of the IRA forced out of the labour market. This is proven by the fact that rather than become unemployed, many workers have chosen to occupy and to continue producing in many bankrupt factories in Argentina (Bedggood, 2004).

 

Elsewhere in Latin America, as well as in Asia and Africa, the rapidly growing population of peasants and unemployed workers living in barrios and slums testifies to the fact that capitalism converts pre-capitalist modes and labour systems into a huge reserve of cheap labour.  This is not an argument against, but for, the proletariat as the main class and agent of social change. The peasant movements, landless movements, indigenous peoples’ movements are all surrogates for the global proletariat struggling for land, resources, jobs and welfare to provide their means of subsistence in the face of capital siphoning off their labour into the global market.

 

Arising out of these surrogate working class movements, it is not the ‘multitude’, or the ‘movement of movements’ of the World Social Forum where classes/movements combine in a national patriotic front that poses the real threat to global capitalism. Rather it is the potential power of the organised proletarian and peasant masses that capital fears. This is why in an attempt to avoid popular insurrections the dominant capitalist powers are prepared to replace despotic regimes with popular regimes that allow the masses a voice.  Their hope is that regimes such as that of Chavez in Venezuela and Lula in Brazil, will unite workers with employers behind powerful nationalist or religious ideologies that will pit workers in different countries against one another instead of joining forces across borders to pose a challenge to the rule of international capital (Petras, 2000a).

 

 

Iraq: Nation and Religion against Class

 

Today one of the most persuasive arguments against class is that national identity and religious sectarianism far outweigh any class loyalty of workers and peasants.  Many theorists of post-capitalism or post-modernism assert that productive classes are now dead or dying as social agents of identity, solidarity and change, and that the strongest associations or communities are those of nations or religions. Yet at the same time, they argue that globalisation is weakening national borders and the movement of migrant workers undermining the appeals of nationalism.

 

Iraq is the obvious test case of the prevalence of nationalism and religion over class relations of workers and peasants versus the capitalists. It is a country in which class seems the most unlikely source of social solidarity and change. Yet if we look at the modern history of Iraq we find a history of class struggle. We find that the capitalist classes in the West have conspired with the local ruling class to maintain regimes hostile to the mobilisation and political power of the working class. The CIA and the Baath Party conspired in 1963 to overthrow the Qassem regime that was supported by the Iraqi workers and aligned to the Soviet Union, and then set about systematically eliminating the CP and all organised working class political activity for 40 years. This policy continued until the US and Saddam fell out over control of Iraqi oil (Ali, 2004; Coughlin, 2003:38-44).

 

Today after a decade of wars, blockades and occupation, it is not surprising to find the working class and the poor peasantry weak and divided by competing nationalist and Islamic factions. The appearance is that tribalism and religious sectarianism has replaced the Iraqi working class formation. Yet, out of the most devastating conditions we find that same class re-emerging and reforming itself out of sheer economic necessity. In the oil industry, as well as others, unions have been revived; strikes for basic rights and conditions have been increasing. This in a country which is still occupied by Western powers whose companies are directly exploiting Iraqi resources using Iraqi workers. It seems that in the face of rampant tribal and sectarian rivalry, itself the product of Iraq’s colonial neo-colonial legacy, the same old social relations of production are re-asserting themselves, and that underlying the appearance of civil war is the reality of class war (Petras, 2004b).

 

 

Conclusion

 

Class is a contested category. I have argued that capitalist social relations persist in global capitalist society so that classes as economic realities underlie and account for the market distribution of income and life chances. Secondary factors such as occupational rent, status and social movements based on ethnicity, gender, nation or religion, are the sometimes complicated effects of class relations and are evidence for, rather than against, the historic dynamic of class struggle. This perspective is, however, one of a number argued within sociology and the social sciences in general.  Each stands or falls on its truth claims as to the causes of persistent and resistant inequality in global capitalist society. As the amateur sociologist V.I. Lenin once said, the test of theory is practice because “the truth is concrete”.

 

 

 

Wright, Erik Olin (2004) ‘Social Class’ in Encyclopaedia of Social Theory.  Edited by George Ritzer, Sage Publications.

 

 

References

 

Ali, Tariq   (2004) Bush in Babylon: The Re-colonisation of Iraq. Verso, London.

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Bedggood, David (2002) ‘Abort, Ignore, Retry: On the Domestic Mode of Production.’ In Gender and Development: Theory, History, Policy and Cases. Eds B.N. Ghosh and P.K. Chopra. Wisdom House, Leeds

Bedggood, David (2004) ‘Hardt and Negri’s ‘Empire’ and ‘Multitude’ in the Argentinazo of December 2001’. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Vol 10, No 2, December.

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Callinicos, Alex (1999) ‘Social Theory Put to the Test of Politics: Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens’, New Left Review, no 236, July/August, 77-102.

Cook, Christopher D. (2000) ‘Temps Demand New Deal’. The Nation, 27 March.

Carchedi, Guglielmo (1987) Class Analysis and Social Research. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.

Cohen, Lisabeth (2003) A Consumers Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post-war America. Alfred A Knopf.  New York.

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