Was it less blurry historically? If it wasn't, why did Marxists concern themselves with ideas such as class consciousness, and class for itself etc. why all the theories like labour aristocracy and ideology to explain how the WC behaved in ways that weren't in the interest of the class. For Marx, revolutionary consciousness was something that develops through action where the reality of class relations becomes more obvious, its not an ideas first theory of political change.
Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class?
- Thread starter brogdale
- Start date
Was it less blurry historically? If it wasn't, why did Marxists concern themselves with ideas such as class consciousness, and class for itself etc. why all the theories like labour aristocracy and ideology to explain how the WC behaved in ways that weren't in the interest of the class. For Marx, revolutionary consciousness was something that develops through action where the reality of class relations becomes more obvious, its not an ideas first theory of political change.
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
I mean the point of the two-class system + petit bourgeoisie was primarily to identify a) people whose material position was underpinned/improved by capitalism who could therefore be expected to defend it b) people whose material position was exploited by capitalism and who were therefore the ones who could potentially be motivated to destroy it c) people who were a bit of each. It's not designed as a guide to people's placement in modern British culture.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
This. So many times this. I’m sure I’ve made the point in this thread before, but if not then elsewhere: but the “do me! Am I the ‘enemy’?” posts we keep getting really, really miss the point. It’s not about that. It’s about a) an analysis of the structures of capitalism, and b) a tool box to dismantle it.
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Brainaddict Perhaps it’s still on the drawing board but I’m still eager to learn how this alliance of downwardly mobile middle class types and ‘other’ precarious workers is going to be built .
I think what's being argued isn't so much that individual what am I? stuff as there's not much point having a tool box if you don't know where you left it as it's so long since you used it, or what the tools are called, or how to use them if there isn't a youtube video to give you a step by step lesson, or if they got rusty, or the parts aren't replaceable.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
brainaddict will be using that concrete everyone's talking about
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
Love it. Great metaphor extending.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Oh FFS, they are no more faith based than your 20 year denials of class struggle
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Yeah I live close to Saltaire, where you can see the houses that were build for labourers, and where you can see the corner houses - designed for foremen - are larger, nicer, lighter than the terraces designed for most workers.
There have always been a range of material conditions that exist for the working class, and those different material conditions have led to different workers taking different paths .
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
He's had 20 years to start building this alliance between downwardly mobile middle classes and 'other' precarious workers?
A380
How do I change this 'custom title' thing then?
But he has build a, probably unique, alliance on here with the shear range of political positions on here in opposition to his ideas…
The39thStep
Urban critical thinker
Thank heavens we don't have any downwardly mobile middle class on here.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
I think it already exists in organisations like IWGB, United Voices of the World and LondonRenters Union. They're relatively small so there is a question of how to scale up.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
It's hard to overstate how viciously unequal pre-WW1 Britain was, though. Hugely important changes have occurred that have reduced the material distances between classes and changed the relationships between them.
Sounds like a reasonable description of Momentum and most active left wing groups tbh.
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
It's considerably more unequal now at the extremes, it's just that the spread is less sharply pronounced and the tools which bury the suffering are far better. 17% of UK households go without food or severely ration as of 2023, but it's a news item among many.
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But my point was that at the time there were also conversations about the limits of working class political activity and that although the differences between classes might have been more obvious due to the very visible and as you say vicious inequality, the nature of that relationship (capital and labour) wasn't always so obvious, it wasn't obvious that it was one of exploitation (in the Marxist sense), the theory of ideology is an attempt to explain how this was seen as the natural order of things and not seen as something that could be changed.
I don't want to get too deep into this because its absolutely not my area of expertise and its a long time since I was politically active and educating myself in this, I don't know the stats for wealth distribution pre-WW1. I'm not trying to say things are exactly as they were and only the old ways are reliable forms of struggle (If I thought that I'd be politically active now and I'm not) but just trying to see where things might not be so qualitatively different and how we might use the idea that its all changed now as a way of saying nothing can be done.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
I think there might be some ones that go further back too somewhere - I'll have to have another look.
This one does emphasise how much of an anomaly ~1940-80 was
dylanredefined
Not a house elf a tiger
If you rely on a salary you are working class
To extend the earlier analogy, Marx’s analysis provides an excellent set of tools for the toolkit. A saw, a hammer, a screwdriver — all things you need. But since the toolkit was originally put together, people have also started making cupboards with fastenings that need little star-shaped allen keys, and reinforced concrete buildings that need powered jackhammers to dismantle them. In short, the tools in the old toolkit are not out of date, but the toolkit as a whole lacks key elements.
And it’s not like those tools haven’t been invented. You can be sure that the other side is using them! For example, there is the SIMCA (Social Identity Model of Collective Action), which analyses the circumstances under which people will proceed all the way along the pathway to taking collective action. You can use the SIMCA to try to recruit people to action, or you can use it to create blockages to prevent that happening. Believe me, power is already employing it for the latter. Then there are various attempts from the field of community psychology to understand the ways in which social movements can cohere from below to force the rich to pay attention, which indicate success arising from focusing on context as much as building a strong voice.
And from a wider theoretical framework, there is Social Dominance Theory, which sought to extend what the authors viewed as the successes of Marxist analysis to include matters of social psychological importance. This notionally splits the forces on society that reproduce power relations into three elements: the system-wide influences (eg ideology and institutions), the intergroup level (eg social contexts and social behaviours) and the interpersonal level (eg personal prejudice). I have my critique of this model, namely that it insufficiently accounts for the structural super-systemic influences (eg capitalism as a whole), but that doesn’t change the importance of what it includes over and above the purely materialist. Any attempt to reconfigure power relations without taking its findings into account (hundreds of papers have been written since 1999 that establish various parts of the model empirically) will inevitably ignore something important.
And it’s not like those tools haven’t been invented. You can be sure that the other side is using them! For example, there is the SIMCA (Social Identity Model of Collective Action), which analyses the circumstances under which people will proceed all the way along the pathway to taking collective action. You can use the SIMCA to try to recruit people to action, or you can use it to create blockages to prevent that happening. Believe me, power is already employing it for the latter. Then there are various attempts from the field of community psychology to understand the ways in which social movements can cohere from below to force the rich to pay attention, which indicate success arising from focusing on context as much as building a strong voice.
And from a wider theoretical framework, there is Social Dominance Theory, which sought to extend what the authors viewed as the successes of Marxist analysis to include matters of social psychological importance. This notionally splits the forces on society that reproduce power relations into three elements: the system-wide influences (eg ideology and institutions), the intergroup level (eg social contexts and social behaviours) and the interpersonal level (eg personal prejudice). I have my critique of this model, namely that it insufficiently accounts for the structural super-systemic influences (eg capitalism as a whole), but that doesn’t change the importance of what it includes over and above the purely materialist. Any attempt to reconfigure power relations without taking its findings into account (hundreds of papers have been written since 1999 that establish various parts of the model empirically) will inevitably ignore something important.
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not a trot
Well-Known Member
Can't say I've heard many working class refer to their wage as a salary.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Those graphs don't really capture everything, though, wrt inequality. For example, how is a universal health service accounted for in those graphs? Or comprehensive education systems? Or the pulling down of tenement slums to be replaced with council housing? The viciousness of poverty in Victorian and Edwardian Britain isn't really captured in that graph.
chilango
Hypothetical Wanker
No they don't. I doubt that would be possible. (Although you can see a correlation between the period of time when those changes happened and the falling inequality charted there from 1940ish to 1980ish - a curve echoed in graphs of social mobility too)
But poverty, inequality, social mobility etc etc are just some of the things that can be 'measured' as results of economic, political and social change.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Sure. Things were getting progressively better from the 40s up to around 1980 and have been getting progressively worse ever since. Here in the UK, you can date the decline from the start of Thatcher, pretty much, or perhaps 1976 when Labour first accepted IMF dictats. But that doesn't mean things haven't fundamentally changed since pre-WW1 times, when you could get a fair idea how much a man earned just by measuring his height.
Another graph that would show the changes in the last 40 years would be one showing how wages as a percentage of GDP have fallen over that period. That's the neoliberal project writ large - forcing people to obtain assets on top of their declining wages to get by.
Another graph that would show the changes in the last 40 years would be one showing how wages as a percentage of GDP have fallen over that period. That's the neoliberal project writ large - forcing people to obtain assets on top of their declining wages to get by.
Just been reading The Age of Extremes by Hobsbawm and this passage struck me as telling about what has changed. I can't be bothered to write it out myself so I took a photo of the pages which you can read as the attachments below if you are interested.
He basically describes how "we" dominated "I" in working class communities, as inadequate living space meant they had to live their lives publicly, socialising publicly, kids playing on the streets... but TV meant you no longer had to go to the football match in person when you can watch on TV, and the social attraction of a union meeting also subsided as people got more distractions at home, and the telephone meant people could gossip from home without going to a public place for the sake of chatter.
Hobsbawm doesn't mention this but my dad always described how back then everyone would get the same bus into work together, take lunch together, and so on. In my dad's words, working in a factory turned you into a Communist.
The core nature of the class relation may not have changed, but the means in which class consciousness is generated has faded. True, working class people still have less space but people live much more individualised lives now. There are no more mass employers or factory towns and people's working lives and social lives are much more diffuse so it is harder to build a true sense of "we".
There are also other things which have obfuscated the class relationship. As others have said, dependence on private pensions (and also things like employee share purchase plans) give people who would otherwise be proletarian a material interest in share prices or property values. Some of this is deliberate social engineering, e.g. Thatcher's sale of council housing, and employee share purchase plans is clearly a means by the employer to get employees to think in terms of shareholder value.
The third factor is globalisation, strike action has lost the potency it once had when the bosses can respond by growing their branch in India.
I don't know what the answer is if you hope to overthrow capitalism. But I feel that we have to rethink things.
The only ideas I can think of is that the things which divide us from the localised "we" of 20th Century working class movements can be turned into something that creates a new "we" of the internationalised working class. The revolution in telecommunications has separated us more from our neighbours and communities but it has potential to link us to millions in all corners of the world. Globalised capital has blunted the bargaining power of labour but it has also created the seeds of a truly internationalised labour movement.
I don't know how this is going to happen, but I think building something international is something the left should be focused primarily on. I was briefly involved with Yannis Varoufakis" DiEM25 movement (my sister and her boyfriend were much more heavily involved) which I thought was a good idea to build a transnational political party but in practise it was extremely difficult to get off the ground because of laws regulating international financing of political parties which makes it extremely difficult to organise internationally in a credible way. But I feel like there are ways around this with the right sort of cleverness and trickery.
I'm convinced that managing to build a kind of transnational political party with a unified brand (symbols are, like it or not, powerful mobilisers of collective action and identity) which takes full advantage of all our means of telecommunications to bring together disparate perspectives into a common universal program while also being decentralised and federal enough to reflect differences in local conditions would serve as a kind of lightning rod to bring together the emergence of a new kind of "us" identity, which is proletarian but also cosmopolitan and globalised, tech-savvy, cutting edge, subversive, and sexy, something which people feel excited to be a part of. Maybe it has to be not just a political party but also a kind of social media and global community. I think use of AI translation tools which are just within reach open up new possibilities for ordinary people being able to converse in real time without a shared language, something as historically unprecedented as the printing press was so why shouldn't it be as politically explosive as that was as well?
It won't resemble the worker's movements of the 20th Century but I think that trying to revive them by the same means is doomed to failure and we should be aspiring to create something new or at least thinking of a new approach.
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Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
That's a good post Rimbaud, but I think it still misses one basic point: the increase of consumption power of workers from a hundred years ago to now. Imagine telling a worker between the wars that they could fly to Europe for a day's wage, or that they could afford to buy new clothes every month (and we know the true cost of that is paid by other workers but that's not the point here), or that they could eat a diet from all over the world.
Of course it's also true that there has been much undermining of that progress in consumption power recently, to the point that foodbanks are a regular part of everyday life for many people. Yet that is 3-5% of the population using foodbanks. You don't build mass movements on even 5% of people, no matter how outrageous their falling into poverty may be. And yes, the cost of living crisis has affected many more, but from a consumption level that was unimaginable a hundred years ago.
Orthodox socialists insist that workers only believe they have benefited from capitalism, and are in fact exploited by it, but this is rank sophistry to those who feel they've got a good quality of life out of capitalism. Even when wages stopped rising, the increase in cheap goods from china benefited working people here enormously and people really feel that. They really experience it. There's no point in being in denial about that experience. And of course we can talk about outsourcing our immiseration abroad - but it does mean less immiseration in this country.
Of course it's also true that there has been much undermining of that progress in consumption power recently, to the point that foodbanks are a regular part of everyday life for many people. Yet that is 3-5% of the population using foodbanks. You don't build mass movements on even 5% of people, no matter how outrageous their falling into poverty may be. And yes, the cost of living crisis has affected many more, but from a consumption level that was unimaginable a hundred years ago.
Orthodox socialists insist that workers only believe they have benefited from capitalism, and are in fact exploited by it, but this is rank sophistry to those who feel they've got a good quality of life out of capitalism. Even when wages stopped rising, the increase in cheap goods from china benefited working people here enormously and people really feel that. They really experience it. There's no point in being in denial about that experience. And of course we can talk about outsourcing our immiseration abroad - but it does mean less immiseration in this country.
Who's in denial about it? Who can't be aware that capitalism delivers the goods (so to speak). But it doesn't change the fundamental nature of exploitation (that is, the creation of surplus value) and it doesn't do away with its fundamental contradictions, like its ongoing expansion contains within it the seeds of its own downfall, currently the destruction of the planet.
What I'd question perhaps is the theory of alienation, that which Marx felt was central to human nature - creativity and control of that creativity - is it? People are concerned with the health and well being of themselves and their family, they want to have some fun, they're not defined by their work, that now seems quite pragmatic. Marx was clearly a hugely creative person, revolutions are stories of untapped creativity, so there's this notion of true human nature unfettered by oppression and released by collective agency, but perhaps this is as good as it gets, you go to work, you have some job satisfaction, you have hobbies out of work, and that's enough, and later stage capitalism certainly aids that. Consumerism creates and amplifies those interests, our creativity outside of work, allows you to experience beautiful objects and places, and it aids other things most humans find important, such as belonging through social status etc. Is this an alienated state?
But your focus on individual and family consumption doesn't seem to acknowledge that its at a cost of collective provision, so lack of funding and public control over public health, and schools, care for the elderly etc. These aren't issues when you're young and healthy, or they are, but they're in the background, they're in the foreground if you have a child with SEN who can't go to school, or you have a parent who needs full time care for dementia, or your cancer was diagnosed too late for treatment. They are if you're a worker in these systems too. The fantasy of freedom of choice - exciting and liberating - doesn't extend here.
What I'd question perhaps is the theory of alienation, that which Marx felt was central to human nature - creativity and control of that creativity - is it? People are concerned with the health and well being of themselves and their family, they want to have some fun, they're not defined by their work, that now seems quite pragmatic. Marx was clearly a hugely creative person, revolutions are stories of untapped creativity, so there's this notion of true human nature unfettered by oppression and released by collective agency, but perhaps this is as good as it gets, you go to work, you have some job satisfaction, you have hobbies out of work, and that's enough, and later stage capitalism certainly aids that. Consumerism creates and amplifies those interests, our creativity outside of work, allows you to experience beautiful objects and places, and it aids other things most humans find important, such as belonging through social status etc. Is this an alienated state?
But your focus on individual and family consumption doesn't seem to acknowledge that its at a cost of collective provision, so lack of funding and public control over public health, and schools, care for the elderly etc. These aren't issues when you're young and healthy, or they are, but they're in the background, they're in the foreground if you have a child with SEN who can't go to school, or you have a parent who needs full time care for dementia, or your cancer was diagnosed too late for treatment. They are if you're a worker in these systems too. The fantasy of freedom of choice - exciting and liberating - doesn't extend here.
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