Class Identity

This retreat has manifested itself in a number of ways, one of which is an obfuscation of what class actually means. In place of the basic division between a class of people who work for a living and an employer class that exploits them are substituted various ideas of class as a cultural phenomenon, determined by levels of education, or engagement with the arts and culture, as if the working class hasn’t always produced music, art, and literature, and fought for access to education as part of a wider struggle for emancipation — not to mention the proud tradition of working- class self-education.

Within this obfuscation, various forms of a ‘middle class’ are inserted. This middle class is variously argued to be better educated or more affluent, or seen to have a wider range of options than other sections of the working class. This effectively functions as a means to split the working class into different fractions, assumed to have different interests and different means for pursuing them. The question of class then quickly becomes a complex sociological one, where the focus is on identifying and classifying various different social layers of society while obscuring its basic fundamental divisions — the fact that the vast majority of people in this country work for a living and have no means to support themselves other than selling their labour power to those who own the means of production.

Class, considered in these complex, sociological terms — often as ‘social class’ — becomes simply a matter of identity, and one identity among many, at that. This is not to say that the wide range of factors that affect an individual’s identity are not important or relevant. However, surely the point is to find commonalities within this complexity. Reducing the fundamental basis on which production is carried out to nothing more than an aspect of identity undermines the explanatory power of class.

Class acts as an explanatory principle by grouping together all those whose labour, in all its diversity, is systematically exploited by capitalism. In moving away from this principle, class ‘identity’ becomes purely descriptive, a small part of a wider framework that simply describes the complexity of human interaction without attempting to explain anything. This version of class as identity allows people to adopt or disown a working-class persona as it suits them — see various figures on the Labour right — often while pursuing policies which will deepen inequality or exacerbate child poverty.

The retreat from class by the trade union movement and the Left has also left a vacuum in which the far right can develop a narrative around the ‘white working class’ or ‘indigenous working class’ as part of its attempts at culture wars. In this it deceptively uses the language of class long absent from the Left to impose the racial divisions which suit its agenda.

The net effect is to undermine a position based on class solidarity — that the working class is made up of workers with a common experience of exploitation and can act together in challenging and ultimately overthrowing that exploitation — and replace it with an individualised approach to identity.

A Changing World

The retreat from class was fundamentally rooted in a real-world shift in power, and the attempt of the organised working class to come to terms with the defeats of the 1980s. However, on an ideological level, it was also a response to an economic determinism and reductionism that had crept into class politics. This caricature of Marxism essentially presented the idea that you can simply read across from the economic basis of society and determine the ‘true’ interests and politics of the working class (something Marx and Engels argued vociferously against themselves).

This approach came under increasing criticism in the 1970s and 1980s. However, in challenging this one-dimensional structural determinism, and attempting to embrace the true complexity of the real world, many thinkers abandoned any attempt to explain that complexity.

At the same time, there was a serious attempt to broaden a definition of the working class that had long become outdated, both by recognising shifts in the nature of work and therefore in the composition of the working class that had occurred throughout the 1970s and 1980s in particular, and by recognising the distinct contributions made by black workers, by women, and by others who had long been excluded from dominant conceptions of class, and who faced continued racism and sexism within the trade union movement, as well as outside of it.

There was a clear need to widen the dominant conception of class to recognise changes in class composition, and the multiple ways in which race, sex, and class are ultimately intertwined. There was a pressing need to understand the role played by oppression based on ideologies of racism and sexism in laying the basis for the super- exploitation which drove the development of capitalism, through slavery, colonial exploitation, and women’s unpaid labour in the home.

However, in the minds of many, rather than make this leap, movements against racism and feminist movements were crudely characterised as ‘new social forces’ which needed to be brought into alliance with the working class. Women workers and black workers were thus still seen as external to the working class and, for many, taking up these struggles was posed as an alternative to ‘outmoded’ ideas based on class, rather than an essential component of class politics.

This contributed to a wide range of writing on the left that sought to move beyond what it saw as the narrow confines of class. This work is epitomised by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s classic book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, which essentially defends the thesis that we need to abandon ‘the vanity of the aspiration’ that class struggle should be placed at the foundation of social division, and instead embrace ‘the plurality and indeterminacy of the social’ as the fundamental basis of a new political project, ‘radically libertarian and infinitely more ambitious in its objectives than that of the classic left’.

Politics Without Class

These moves were paralleled in the Labour Party where, following the electoral defeats of 1979 and 1983, there were calls to move away from supporting collective bargaining, opposing wage restraint, and talking in terms of explicitly pro–working class policies. This also meant dumping the Alternative Economic Strategy championed by many in the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and Labour Party during the 1970s and early 1980s.

Fast forward to the 1990s, and Anthony Giddens — the key ideological guru of the New Labour project, which was an expression and outcome of the retreat from class — was arguing that ‘Social democratic parties no longer have a consistent “class bloc” on which to rely. Since they can’t depend on their previous identities, they have to create new ones in a socially and culturally more diverse environment.’

By 1996, this process had consolidated within the Labour Party, and Tony Blair was able to say:

We have changed the means of achieving [our] objectives. [We] should and will cross the old boundaries between Left and Right, progressive and conservative. […] On the economy, we move beyond the old battles of the public and private sector. Instead we promote a modern industrial partnership between government and industry.

Blair talked about building a new social order in Britain, with no reference to class at all — ‘a genuine modern civic society … based on merit, commitment and inclusion’. Further, the ‘spirit of solidarity on which the Labour Party was founded’ was to be reimagined in ‘the creation of a true community of citizens involving all the people and based on rights and responsibilities together’. Class had been completely erased.

The impact of this retreat from class has led the trade union movement, too, down plenty of blind alleys. As pessimism took hold in the upper echelons of many trade unions, rather than rebuild collective power and the ability of the working class to change society, solutions were looked for elsewhere. One such alternative that came to dominate union thinking throughout the 1990s and early 2000s was a commitment to social partnership. An enticing vision was sold by Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission, in his address at the 1988 TUC, of a European Union where industrial peace reigned and unions and employers worked hand in hand, with workers having a seat at the table.

All workers, he said, would reap the rewards of ‘better protection for their health and safety at work’, ‘a platform of guaranteed social rights’, and the ‘right to be covered by a collective bargaining agreement’. This would all be delivered by ‘the creation of an internal market abolishing barriers to the free movement of goods, services and investment’, through which Europe could ‘rediscover together the road to prosperity and employment’. This was the vision of partnership between government, employers, and unions that was offered to trade unions.

To a movement with little power left, and with bruising defeats in its immediate past, this vision, however unlikely, seemed like a welcome alternative. The reality, however, was significantly different. Unions traded the opportunity to build real power for working people for legislative change that never encroached seriously on the power of the employer and could be removed at any time by the government or the courts. With the removal of capital controls and a commitment to free movement of goods and free market economics, workers’ living standards deteriorated dramatically and partnership approaches were powerless to stop it. As John Kelly noted in 1996, ‘[I]t is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve partnership with a party who would prefer that you didn’t exist.’

This commitment to partnership went hand in hand, from the late 1990s, with an institutionalised approach to organising that sought the import tactics from the past to rebuild the trade union movement, without the politics from which those approaches flowed. This attempt to draw on the organising approaches of the British shop stewards’ movement of the 1910s and 1920s, or the movement that built the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, without recognising the class politics on which they rested was doomed to failure. The depoliticised ‘toolbox’ of organising in the late 1990s and 2000s failed to rebuild the power of the organised working class, in part because it refused to recognise that building class power was its aim.

This period is also marked by what was almost an embarrassment over the material interests of the working class. Trade unions attempted to reframe their ideas as those of society as a whole, and repaint themselves as institutions of ‘civil society’. This is not to argue that connecting immediate workplace demands to those of the working class more broadly is somehow wrong, or even unnecessary. However, this reframing as the interests of ‘society’ became an alternative for expressing class interests and class demands — dissolving rather than strengthening the interests of the working class.

Rebuilding the Working Class

This move away from a class explanation of society does not reflect a fundamental change in society itself. There have been huge shifts in the nature and organisation of work, and consequent shifts in the composition of the working class. However, a country in which the richest 10 percent of the population owns 43 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 50 percent shares just 9 percent, has clearly not moved on from class division.

In the wake of the 2022–3 strike wave, and with the trade union movement reasserting both its relevance and a more militant stance, we now have an opportunity to begin to reverse the retreat from class and to once again move to class solidarity and class consciousness which is essential to working class struggle. But within that, we need to avoid the mistakes of the past.

If the retreat from class was in part a response to overly structuralist and determinist approaches to class, then we need an approach to class that puts working-class agency right at the centre. This does not mean abandoning any idea of class as rooted in the economic, in the relations of production that develop in a given society. But it does mean understanding class formation as an act in which the working class itself plays the leading role. In the words of E. P. Thompson, the working class ‘made itself as much as it was made’, and this process of class formation and re-formation is ongoing.

Similarly, if we are not to slip into the narrow conceptions of class that dominated the trade union movement of the past and divided the working class, then we need a broad conception of class which includes black workers and women workers at its core, and a recognition of the ways in which oppression based on racism and sexism are a fundamental part of the architecture of class exploitation. We need to build a working- class fightback that unites black and white, women and men, in taking control over their own lives and shaping their own destiny.

We have the opportunity to put an understanding of class back at the centre of the trade union and labour movement, and to put the agency of the working class at the centre of changing the world. We neglect that opportunity at our peril.