LENIN'S TOMB

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Standing replies on the 'precariat' posted by Richard Seymour

Following my recent article for the New Left Project on the 'precariat' and its misuses, which used Guy Standing's book on the subject as a foil for its polemical thrust, Standing has taken up a right to reply on the website. In his piece, he attempts to defend not just the concept of the 'precariat' as he has defined it, but more importantly the body of research behind it and the strategic orientations arising from it. I will be frank: I don't think the reply does Standing any good at all. I hear his call for cool, dispassionate but thorough engagement, but must bluntly say that he has singularly failed to display this in his retort. Perhaps understandably, given the caustic tone of some of my comments, he is so angered by what I have said that he spends a great deal of time contriving 'gotchas', attempting to catch me in a gauche error or inconsistency. This undermines the substantive case which he tries to make, which in itself would merit serious reflection. So, I will begin by disposing of the 'gotchas', answer Standing's claim that I have misrepresented some crucial aspects of his work, and then try to say something useful about his broader theoretical and empirical arguments.

Gotchas

To begin with, Standing asserts that I attribute to him ideas that he doesn't hold. So, for example, he says that I misattribute to him the term "class-in-becoming". I don't specifically attribute that term to him, but even if I did, he does use the term "class-in-the-making", which is so close to identical as to make the objection petty. The same applies to Standing's complaint that he does not use the term 'proficiat': he uses the almost identical term 'proficians' to describe a class of professionals and technicians. In a similar gesture, Standing cheaply suggests that he could not have rejected Blue Labour when the book went to press. But he knows perfectly well that the reference is not to the book, but to his article in The Guardian dealing precisely with the subject of Blue Labour.

Standing goes on to represent my own position as unequivocally hostile to the notion of the 'precariat'. So, for example, he says that I reject the notion of the precariat as a "totally unsatisfactory concept", but then contradict myself by deploying the same concept. In fact, I say that "at present" it is unsatisfactory. I do not say that I "straightforwardly reject the term". I impute this position to many working within a marxist purview, and moreover go on to explicitly oppose such outright rejection. I say that the critics are wrong, that the concept "cannot be dismissed", that a "defensive cleaving to orthodoxy" will not suffice. The whole thrust of the article is an attempt to dis-embed the concept from its current articulation, which I think is problematic, and conceive of it in a wholly different light. This isn't so much "a matter of logic" as one of satisfactory engagement with opposing arguments. Standing alleges that in regard to the impact of neoliberalism on labour markets, I say that "nothing is 'new'". In fact, I say no such thing. Having identified several novel effects of neoliberalism, I say: "It is not the case that ‘precarity’ is a nonsense, therefore, nor even that there is nothing inherently novel about its present forms. Precarity is built into neoliberal capitalism". Further, "it would be mistaken to simply deny the changes that are taking place". And so on. Similarly, Standing attributes to me the claim that "job stability has not declined". In fact, he has taken this statement from a summary of a particular position which I explicitly reject. And when he complains that I attribute to him the claim that the precariat is analogous to the old lumpenproletariat, he misses the fact that a) I don't attribute an explicit claim of this kind to him, b) I am referring solely to its prognosticated role as a "monster", a "dangerous class", apt to play a leading role in a future fascist revival.

Matters are not improved much when Standing tries to find fault with my marxism. Thus, he finds an 'irony' in the fact that I cite Poulantzas, and that Poulantzas was (for a period) a 'disciple' of Althusser, who in turn was subject to a 'withering' (in fact, consistently bitter and ill-informed) critique by E P Thompson. All that Standing has done here is indicate that he is aware of some of the general intellectual context of these theoretical arguments, which is good for him but doesn't advance the debate one iota. Similarly, he maintains that I use "un-Marxian notions", and that my invocation of the "professional middle class" implies that there must be four classes in my schema. In fact, I am simply distinguishing between strata within the middle class: if the traditional petty bourgeoisie tended to comprise lone traders, small businessmen, artisans, and professionals operating independently, those I am describing as members of the "professional middle class" are those professionals who, rather than trading independently, are affiliated to the public sector and large corporations, (tending to comprise part of a global disciplinary apparatus), and thus have different patterns of autonomy and social power. I'm quite happy for this distinction to be reproved and argued with, whether on marxist or other grounds, but it would be better if this were done on the basis of what it is, rather than what it is not.

Misrepresentations

One could go on in this vein, but what is motivating this attempted debunking on Standing's part is disgruntlement with the way his work has been treated. He feels he has been misrepresented and, at that, in the most uncharitable ways. What he is most offended by is the sarcastic suggestion that he favours "the full commodification of pregnant women". Very well. It was a deliberately provocative claim, and only half in jest. But his response is not as reassuring as he perhaps imagines it to be. He says that the precariat should have the same entitlements as everyone else. So far, so unobjectionable. But he doesn't mention in his reply that in the book he actually means by this that maternity benefit should be abolished rather than reformed in a progressive direction, because such non-monetary benefits constitute a partial de-commodification of labour. The distinction he makes between supporting the full commodification of "labour" as an activity and the de-commodification of people as "labour power" will not hold. What Standing favours is the full marketization and commodification of jobs, and the job transaction involves the sale not of labour, but of labour power (ie, the ability to work for a period of so many hours in a week). Standing is quite explicit in that the commodification he favours involves abolishing non-monetary benefits such as maternity leave in favour of payment per hours. In short, the full commodification of pregnant women as labour power is, whether or not he likes the implication, exactly what he argues in favour of. And to this extent, despite the centre-left thrust of his politics and his support for mildly redistributive policies such as a modest minimum income guarantee, his attack on maternity benefits and support for a "free market" in labour is indistinguishable from the position of the Tory think-tank, the Social Market Foundation.

Standing also rejects the idea that he takes for granted Gorz's claim that the working class is finished. In fact, he says:

"The ‘working class’, ‘workers’ and the ‘proletariat’ were terms embedded in our culture for several centuries. People could describe themselves in class terms, and others would recognise them in those terms, by the way they dressed, spoke and conducted themselves. Today they are little more than evocative labels. Gorz (1982) wrote of ‘the end of the working class’ long ago."

Importantly, he leaves the argument at that, offering no reasons to think of it as correct - in other words, he takes Gorz's assessment 'for granted'.

On the substantive question of who the 'precariat' is, and how it is defined, Standing objects to my saying that his conception of the precariat involves a definition that is purely negative and critical in content. He argues that in saying so, I omit the radical, transformative aspects of precarious labour described in the book. This is a non-sequitur. I am not attributing to Standing a purely negative approach to precarious labour in a normative sense. I am saying that his definition contains no positive content, that the precariat is defined more by "what it is not than what it positively is". Nor will suffice to claim that Marx defined the proletariat in purely negative, critical terms. The 'two freedoms' are positive attributes: they do not merely distinguish the proletariat from the feudal peasantry, but stipulate specific relations between workers, the means of production, and other classes. The proletarian is free to sell her labour power to whomsoever she chooses, or not, and free from the means to do anything but sell her labour power. That is the meaning of the double freedom of the proletariat.

Yet, Standing insists that the precariat in his conception is also defined positively by reference to: "‘status dissonance’ ... “status frustration”, combined with unstable labour, systematic insecurity, a unique structure of social income ... and a high degree of work-for-labour". I take the point that he considers these to be positive attributes of the precariat, yet I find this rather thin as a definition. These are arguably effects of precarious labour, but they cannot form the basis for a positive definition of a class, since they say nothing about what makes the class what it is, what constitutes its relation to other classes, the principle of its reproduction as a class, and so on.

This is related to another point, where Standing, opposing "fanciful images of a united working class", insists that objective factors divide the old proletariat into new classes. In fact, this elides an important distinction. The unity of a class is something that is actively constructed and achieved at the level of politics, and cannot be assumed. The fact that classes are divided by numerous factors (fractionalised, segmented, and atomised), and at various levels of experience, is something that a class-based political strategy, including of the kind that Standing advocates, would certainly have to be aware of and counteract. But to argue that these divisions are such that the working class is split into new classes requires that one: a) clearly stipulate what defines the working class as such - ie what constitutes its relation to other classes, what is the principle of its formation as a class, by what means is it reproduced, etc.; and b) therefore explains what new principles of formation, reproduction and relationship to other classes defines the supposed new classes emerging from the division. Standing has at no point offered a satisfactory definition of the working class, resorting instead to a straw man 'labourism'. On this point, Standing also feels he has been misrepresented, stating that his critique of twentieth century 'labourism' is distinct from an attack on "traditional Labourism", and that by the former he means "the systematic equating of labour with work". In fact, he routinely uses the term 'labourism' to refer to something more than that: notably, the social democratic welfare state, full employment, corporatist bargaining, and so on. In the UK context, this just is "traditional Labourism", and it is this historical experience that he uses as his model of the working class against which to differentiate the 'precariat'. His definition of the precariat thus says nothing about what makes it a class. The factors of division that he adduces here (job security and occupational regulation) are not clearly explained as principles of class division. They could just as well work as axes of differentiation within classes.

Raising what would appear to be a fundamental problem of misinterpretation, Standing suggests that I miss the prognosis underpinning his book, making no distinction between labour and work, and thus not grasping the emancipatory potential in the recognition that labour is inherently 'alienating' and at odds with the humanistic conception of work. Here I will make two points. First, I didn't comment on this emancipatory ideology largely because it is secondary to the definition of the precariat as a class distinct from the proletariat. My argument, though it uses him as a foil, should not be confused with a review of Standing's book. Second, I have come to reject the problematic of alienation, as one founded on the superstition of 'human nature' upon which all humanisms must ultimately be based. I don't expect Standing to agree, but the point is that our terms are sufficiently incommensurate that any comment I would have made in this regard would have at least doubled the length of the original text and any ensuing exchange.

Methods and data

That Standing is a sociologist with a body of serious work and a research project extending back over decades is not in doubt. I say this because Standing has taken the trouble to point it out when it genuinely wasn't in question. So, one anticipates that when he raises methodological and statistical issues, he will do so in a rigorous and careful way. I will suggest that in this polemical context, he hasn't been as careful as he might have otherwise been.

First of all, he takes issue with my citation of the author Kevin Doogan. He is quite wrong to claim that I cite Doogan "without citing counter-arguments or evidence". In fact, I cite (in the context of the piece), a great deal of empirical data, only some of which is drawn from Doogan's book (other data was taken from the comparative sociologist Goran Therborn). Further, I do not simply second Doogan's conclusions. Doogan is cited as a theoretically and empirically robust critic of notions of precarious labour, but I specifically distance myself from the simple categorical rejection of such notions. Nor do I have any inherent objection to caveats regarding Doogan's use of statistics to make a case which, as I have made clear, I think tends to throw out the baby with the bathwater. However, Standing's rebuttal is problematic.

He complains that the ten tables supplied in chapter seven of Doogan's book specifically dealing with occupational change in OECD countries only cover a period up to 2002, suggesting that the data therefore doesn't cover a whole decade of change since then. It is true that "these were the only tables he provided" but these tables do not comprise the only relevant statistical data provided, much of which covers a period well after 2002. Nor is chapter seven the only relevant chapter of the book (most of my citations were drawn from chapter six, in which Standing's conception of employment security is briefly discussed). Not only that, but the period between 1983/1991 and 2002 covered by the tabulated data is relevant because it covers approx ten to twenty years during which neoliberalism was exerting its effects.

Nonetheless, should we be wary of this data? It doesn't show an average decline in the rates of long-term employment, but Standing argues that there is a factor concealed in all this, which is the ageing of the workforce during the period covered. This should have resulted in an increase in long-term employment, all other things being equal. Yet if the increase is only modest, then there must be a counter-acting trend away from long-term employment. This seems reasonable on the face of it, but there are a number of important factors that he doesn't mention. The first is that the periods covered were, on average, periods of employment expansion. This tends to means that the rate at which people are employed long-term relative to the total workforce will decline, as more new workers are incorporated into full-time work. I am not competent to say for certain which factor, ageing or employment expansion, exerts greater effects. I can only say that, based on the OECD data that Doogan supplies, the ageing of the workforce does not consistently result in an increase in the rate of long-term employment. Changing retirement patterns means that long-term employment declined among men aged 55-64. On balance, pending further research, I tend to think that if there is any underlying trend away from long-term employment, it is a very modest one counteracted by trends in the opposite direction.

The second issue unmentioned by Standing is that trends in long-term employment vary considerably. Although there is an average tendency for long-term employment to increase, it varies by demographic and economic sector. For those aged 25-34, the rate is declining significantly; for women 35 and over, it is increasing dramatically. Any decline in the rate of long term employment is, meanwhile, detectible mainly in specific economic sectors such as agriculture. To this extent, the case presented by Doogan, not satisfactorily rebutted by Standing, is that industrial re-structuring under neoliberalism is creating highly uneven effects which depend on sector and demographic, and thus don't conform to the typical portrait of a secular shift toward short-term and temporary labour.

Similarly, Standing asserts that the low rate of rate of temporary employment in the UK cannot be taken as a typical example of the scale of temporary labour and explains that he gives reasons in his book. It is correct that he repudiates the statistics for the UK and US due to their putatively restrictive definition of what constitutes temporary labour. Granting this point, it doesn't seem to work as an adequate rebuttal. The empirical data I raised was for the whole of the OECD, representing the wide variations within it. The figure for the UK was mentioned, literally, parenthetically. The point being made here was that "the changes are neither as epochal as some theorists would have it, nor are they uniform in their conditions or effects". I am not persuaded that Standing has made the case that there is an overall trend in capitalism toward habituating the majority to precarious labour.

Conclusion

I stand by my argument, in the absence of a persuasive case against it, that the 'precariat' is not a class. The arguments in favour of the precariat's existence as a class are at present too impressionistic to be convincing, and the data doesn't support the idea that its supposed characteristics are distributed in a manner indicative of class formation. I also cleave strongly to the point that precarity in employment is not distributed in the way that would be anticipated by post-industrial theories such as that advanced in Standing's book. Most of it is concentrated outside of the core capitalist economies, where there continues to be a large peasantry and where industrialization is in a relatively early phase - India, China, sub-Saharan Africa. This is no doubt in part because the global re-structuring of capitalist relations in the neoliberal period has involved actively displacing precarity to the margins. The extent to which this can continue to take place is limited by the severity of the global crisis. But this still doesn't support the claim that precarious labour is becoming the situation of the majority of workers in the core capitalist economies, much less that those in precarious labour are forming a class.

There is one final issue I would raise, which appears in Loic Wacquant's discussion of the 'precariat'. For Wacquant, the 'precariat' comprises the "insecure fringes of the new proletariat" rather than a class in itself. Nonetheless, since Standing views the precariat as a 'class-in-the-making', which he calls on to become a 'class-for-itself', Wacquant's observation on this prospect is relevant. He says: "the precariat is a sort of still-born group, whose gestation is necessarily unfinished since one can work to consolidate it only to help its members flee from it, either by finding a haven in stable wage labour or by escaping from the world of work altogether (through social redistribution and state protection). Contrary to the proletariat in the Marxist vision of history, which is called upon to abolish itself in the long term by uniting and universalizing itself, the precariat can only make itself to immediately unmake itself." And there lies the rub. If one were to truly address the specific problems associated with precarious labour, the distinct social characteristics that Standing says make the 'precariat' a class would mainly disappear. Unlike other classes, which are reproduced through class struggle (unless and until classes as such are abolished), the precariat would abolish itself as soon as it struggled as a class.

Labels: capitalism, capitalist crisis, class struggle, middle class, neoliberalism, precariat, precarious labour, precarity, ruling class, socialist strategy, working class

Friday, February 10, 2012

We are all precarious: on the 'precariat' and its misuses posted by Richard Seymour

"In this article, I will argue that it is mistaken to treat the precariat as a class. Attempts to make it into a class are theoretically incoherent, and the facts of precarious labour and social precarity are misunderstood if boxed into an ‘emerging class’ thesis. This is important because class analyses underpin political strategies. In the case of the concept’s chief populariser, Standing, the analysis is bound up with a particular set of political articulations and strategic orientations that are more ‘Big Society’ than ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’. I will argue that precarity exerts effects right up the chain of class strata, throughout the working class and into sections of the middle class, especially the petty bourgeoisie. The appellation ‘precariat’ thus works as a kind of populist interpellation, a claim I will explain in more detail in the conclusion. This interpellation, this ‘naming’, operates on a real antagonism. It is one that emerges between the ‘power bloc’ and the rest, particularly in the age of austerity. The precarity built into financialized accumulation was always pushed downward as far as possible. But it is affecting ever wider layers of people, such that only the capitalist class and a few sections of the middle class seem to be protected from it, their security purchased through our precarity. We should embrace the concept of the 'precariat' in this sense, and use it to help found a new, radical majoritarian politics with a distinctly anticapitalist core."

Labels: class, class politics, labour, marxism, middle class, precariat, precarious labour, precarity, ruling class, socialist strategy, working class

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Poulantzas and socialist strategy - part I posted by Richard Seymour

Nicos Poulantzas' detailed and sometimes difficult writings on fascism, dictatorship, the state, capitalism and social classes, were all written with the goal of elaborating strategic concepts to assist the advance toward socialism. This series of posts deals with some aspects of Poulantzas' thinking on political strategy (the whole corpus is obviously far too rich and varied for me to anatomise here), beginning with a look at his ideas on class and class alliances. The idea is not simply to see what, if anything, we can find useful in his strategic conclusions today. It isn't even to decide whether we should agree or disagree with his ideas (Poulantzas' relationship to Eurocommunism will come up consistently, particularly in the final post in this series). It is mainly to look at the method, the steps involved in the development of his strategic concepts. It is to see what complex strategic thinking looks like. If nothing else, in a period when strategic thought on the Left is recovering from a long quietus (see the late Daniel Bensaid's wonderful essay here), the theoretical depth and novelty of Poulantzas' arguments would make him an important contributor to the emerging debates.

I should make it clear that Poulantzas' views evolved and altered in ways I can't properly summarise. Suffice to say that there is an important shift between an early historicist phase, which I won't go into, a structuralist phase, evident in books such as Political Power and Social Classes and Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, and a later phase where he gradually abandoned some of his Althusserian commitments, which can be seen in Fascism and Dictatorship and his final book, State, Power, Socialism. (Althusser's maligned influence deserves some recuperation - fortunately, Gregory Elliot's superb revision of his legacy has been reprinted recently). I should also say upfront that many of the criticisms that follow are 'immanent', taking Poulantzas' marxist framework for granted and faulting him for not following his precepts through to their logical conclusion. This isn't to attack Poulantzas for departing from revealed wisdom in "some holy text" as he might have put it, but simply to judge his writing by standards he himself adopts.

Part I: Classes, the 'new petty bourgeoisie' and class alliances
According to Poulantzas, socialist strategy is weakened by a failure to properly grasp changes in the class structure of contemporary capitalism: "it was on this question, among others, that, as we now know, the socialist development in Chile came to grief." The major development that warranted attention was the growth of "nonproductive wage-earners, i.e. groups such as commercial and bank employees, office and service workers, etc., in short all those who are commonly referred to as 'white-collar' or 'tertiary sector' workers". (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 193) There was a tendency at the time to assess this in terms of the 'embourgeoisement' of the working class and thus the dissolution of hard class boundaries. Others, like the French Communist Party (PCF) to which Poulantzas adhered, theorised this group as an 'intermediate stratum' within a series of strata that exist independently of either the proletariat or the bourgeoisie.

Poulantzas holds that it isn't sufficient to describe this layer as a strata: the "class specificity" of this group had to be grasped. It could not just be subsumed into the wider categories of bourgeois and proletarian either, because the effect of this was to dissolve both categories by compelling theorists to introduce new theoretical determinations that weakened their explanatory power. Theorising them as simply part of the extant middle class tended toward the same conclusion, since such accounts regarded the middle class as a "stew in which classes are mixed together and their antagonisms dissolved, chiefly by forming a site for the circulation of individuals in a constant process of 'mobility' between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat." The result was that classes simply ceased to exist as classes. (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 194-9)

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The starting point for his own analysis was the structuralist framework that he took over from Louis Althusser. Thus, he explained that the concept of class refers to "the overall effects of the structure on the field of social relations and on the social division of labour". (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 199) This structure comprises several distinct regions: "everything happens as if social classes were the result of an ensemble of structures and of their relations, firstly at the economic level, secondly at the political level, and thirdly at the ideological level". (Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, 1975, p. 63) This draws from Althusser, who holds that the capitalist mode of production comprises an articulation of distinct economic, political and ideological levels. Classes must be determined by all three levels - at least, so the early Poulantzas claims. Importantly, however, the economic level bears the strongest freight of determination here. It is in the structures of 'economic exploitation' (the appropriation of surplus value by the bourgeoisie), 'economic ownership' (the power of the bourgeoisie to dispose of economic resources for various uses), and 'economic possession' (the power of the bourgeoisie to organise and determine labour processes), that class is determined first and foremost.

Poulantzas draws an important distinction between class determination and class position. The former is an objective determination: the working class is such due to its situation within the matrix of the capitalist mode of production. The latter is relational and partly subjective. A class can adopt a position that converges with that of another class, without altering its objective class determination. For example, a section of the working class (Poulantzas cites the fabled 'labour aristocracy') may take a position identifying with the bourgeoisie, but "the adoption of bourgeois class positions by a certain stratum of the working class" would not "eliminates its class determination". Class position has some bearing on class determination, however. Classes are "reproduced according to the reproduction of the places of social classes in the class struggle". This, of course, leaves open the possibility that the class struggle will fail to reproduce the places of social classes, or will radically disrupt their efficient reproduction. (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 201-3)

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Poulantzas chooses to define non-productive wage earners as the "new petty bourgeoisie", asserting that "they belong together with the traditional petty bourgeoisie". (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 204) Defining the petty bourgeoisie correctly, he argues, is "the focal point of the Marxist theory of social classes" because it shows that "relations of production alone are not sufficient, in Marxist theory, to determine the place a social class occupies in a mode of production ... It is absolutely indispensable to refer to ideological and political relations". (Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, NLB, 1974, p. 237) So, it's clear that in identifying a "new petty bourgeoisie", he is making both a strategic political intervention which will have profound consequences for the elaboration of class alliances and hegemonic manouevering, and a theoretical intervention in the sociology of classes.

But on what basis does he identify this "new petty bourgeoisie" as a class apart from the working class and akin to the "traditional petty bourgeoisie"? Poulantzas asserts that the layers that Marxists have traditionally identified as petty bourgeois - small property owners who do not exploit wage labour, or only very occasionally - are actually transitional elements proper to pre-capitalist modes of production: this is why Marx expected them to be subsumed over the long-term into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. (This has in fact been an observable trend.) Yet, the "new petty bourgeoisie" identified by Poulantzas seems to be very different - it is not a mass of small producers, but wage earners who do white collar work, mental labour, but do not contribute directly to the production of surplus value. Despite the fact that they are waged, Poulantzas says that their non-productive status excludes them from the working class. To explain this position, he cites Marx to the effect that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is "not derived from the material characteristics of labour ... but from the definite social form, the social relations of production, within which the labour is realised." Thus, "productive labour in a given mode of production is labour that gives rise to the dominant relation of exploitation of this mode ... productive labour is that which directly produces surplus-value, which valorizes capital and is exchanged against capital" (Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, p. 211) Thus, those who perform non-productive labour do not produce surplus value and are thus not central to the reproduction of the dominant relation of exploitation under capitalism. This, for Poulantzas, excludes them from the working class.

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Having said all this, their exclusion from the working class (and from the bourgeoisie) leaves them in a middling position. It doesn't automatically mean they are part of the petty bougeoisie and, as noted, they are very different from traditional petty bourgeois in terms of productive relations. The unity of traditional and new petty bourgeois layers is secured, Poulantzas argues, within the political and ideological regions where they have similar effects. That is to say, in the polarised situation created by the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, they occupy an intermediate position. Their 'negative' definition, arising from their exclusion from the two' fundamental' classes, means that they are not a 'fundamental' class, have no long-term interests in this struggle, and will tend to vacillate as a consequence. They will also converge on certain basic ideological positions: their hatred of the rich combined with fear of proletarianisation will tend to lead them to "status quo anticapitalism" where they embrace property but oppose monopolies in favour of more opportunity and competition; this segues into the second position which is an aspirational faith in "the myth of the 'ladder'" of opportunity; the third is an unwavering belief in the class-neutral position of the state, "statolatry". Because of their shared political and ideological positions, then, they comprise a single class. (Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem of Fascism, NLB, 1974, pp. 237-44; Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, NLB, 1975, pp. 206-12; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 169-70)

Critics of Poulantzas' class analysis point out that it involves a break with Marx's own method. The whole conception is built on what appears to be a non-sequitur: that is, an illegitimate extrapolation from certain arguments in Marx. It is not clear, even from Poulantzas' selected quotes, that Marx excluded 'non-productive' labour from the working class. Indeed, there are several passages that suggest that the division between mental and manual labour that Poulantzas focuses on is not central to Marx's definition of class. Poulantzas' analysis of the new petty bourgeoisie attributes to politics and ideology, more than one's objective situation within the productive matrix, a determining role in one's class position. Not only is this incompatible with Marx, it also contradicts Poulantzas' own statements to the effect that there is an objective class situation that is more important in defining classes than their orientation in any "concrete conjuncture of struggle". (Quoted, Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, p. 164). Even within a recidivist structuralism, Poulantzas' argument seems odd. Recall that in his early work he did insist on the idea that class should be determined at all three levels of the mode of production, but insisted that the economic level had the primary determining role; here, he not only puts the primary determining role at the level of ideology, but he denies any but an indirect economic input.

Lastly, some absurd conclusions appear to follow from Poulantzas' narrow definition of the working class: for example, assuming that the working class only includes those engaged in direct productive or extractive industries, some 70% of the US workforce would be petty bourgeois, and only 20% working class. (see Alex Callinicos, 'The "New Middle Class" and socialist politics', in Chris Harman and Alex Callinicos, The Changing Working Class: Essays on class structure today, Bookmarks, 1987, p. 19) Nonetheless, the strategic conclusions that follow from Poulantzas' class analyses are clear. Poulantzas took from Gramsci the idea that hegemonic struggle was the normal form of political class struggle in a capitalist society. He argued that the working class needed to build hegemonic alliances similar to those built by the bourgeoisie. But if the working class does not form a clear majority, then it is arguably in need of a particular kind of hegemonic cross-class alliance: the Popular Front. Thus, for Poulantzas, the need to win over the petty bourgeoisie was central to the anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist alliances behind Union de la Gauche in France, as well as the possibility of the anti-dictatorship alliance in Greece turning into an anti-imperialist and anti-monopoly alliance. (Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, p. 149) Given the outline of the petty bourgeoisie's political and ideological dispositions that he has given, this will tend to require the dilution of any agenda for socialist transformation. Poulantzas was operating on the left-most end of Eurocommunism, and did not go as far down the road of eschewing class politics and anti-imperialism as some did. Yet, concessions to the economic policies and political tactics of fractions of the bourgeoisie (the 'interior' or 'domestic' bourgeoisie, which may or may not exist), as well as to the purviews of the petty bourgeoisie, were essential to his strategic perspective.

***

Before leaving the subject of class, it's worth stating that one of Poulantzas' most telling insights concerns the way in which 'class interests' should be understood. Here, he rejects the idea the idea that such interests can be determined from the relations of production themselves. The historicist (Hegelian) problematic sees class as a subject of history, with interests that can be inferred from its role as a factor in historical transformation. This raises the problem of how a class becomes aware of those interests and moves from being a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself. It also raises the deeply problematic notion of "false consciousness", to explain how a class fails to grasp its own interests. Instead, Poulantzas argues that 'class interests' are not computable outside the field of 'class practises' in a given conjuncture. That is to say, at any moment in the development of the class struggle there will be a series of 'objective' and 'subjective' factors which limit the working class's possible range of actions. These form a 'horizon of action', defining the maximum possible advances against opposing classes at any given moment. One of the determinants of this horizon is the form of political representation that the class has, which means that the 'interests' of a class in a given moment are susceptible to modification by political intervention, even if the objective circumstances have not changed. (Political Power and Social Classes, NLB, 1975, pp. ; Bob Jessop, Nicos Poulantzas: Marxist Theory and Political Analaysis, Macmillan, 1985, pp. 153-4) As Jessop points out, this puts the emphasis on "strategic calculation" rather than objective, given facts. It also has certain political consequences, inasmuch as it avoids the potential elitism of parties or their intellectual cadres presuming to be the bearers of an objective, historically given truth.

The ensuing posts deal with Poulantzas' ground-breaking work on the state, his arguments on the power bloc, and finally his orientation toward Eurocommunism.

Labels: class, eurocommunists, middle class, poulantzas, ruling class, socialism, socialist strategy, working class

Thursday, March 17, 2011

A working class Tory is something to avoid being at all costs posted by Richard Seymour

Me in The Guardian on the subject of the Tories and the working class:

The public sector jobs massacre has begun with gusto, taking place twice as fast as was predicted. Rightwing mythology has it that the cuts are necessary because of Labour's reckless spending. The state has become bloated, choking the life out of the private sector. Cutting spending, privatising and currying favour with the City will spark off a new wave of dynamism from which all will profit. Negative growth in the last quarter? That's because of "the snow".

But the TUC's latest figures on the distribution of unemployment in the UK – which has now climbed to its highest level since 1994 – send a subtly different message. They show that joblessness in Labour constituencies is on average twice that in Tory constituencies. The extremes are telling. The Tory seat of Stratford-upon-Avon has only one jobseeker for every job. The core Labour constituency of Glasgow North West has 41.7 people chasing every job. The message, conveyed in the usual euphemisms about being "out of touch", is that the Tories are the party of the shires, warriors for their class who never have to see the misery they create. And the TUC is right. After all these years, and all these spin cycles, the Tories are still a party of wealth.

Labels: british capitalism, conservatism, labour, middle class, ruling class, the meaning of david cameron, tories, working class

Tuesday, March 01, 2011

Capitalism and Class posted by Richard Seymour

I'll be speaking on this subject at the 6 Billion Ways event, a gathering supported by Friends of the Earth, War on Want, World Development Movement, Red Pepper, and People & Planet, this Saturday:

Jobs, water, debt, poverty, food, forests, war… Is single issue campaigning missing the wood for the trees? Global justice campaigners in the developing world lament what they see as the increasing depoliticisation of British activism. This session asks if the two ‘C’s are still relevant to UK politics.

Speakers

Doreen Massey, Professor of Geography, Open University
Richard Seymour, Lenin’s Tomb
Phil McLeish, legal advisor to Climate Camp
Anthony Painter, author of Barack Obama: Movement for Change

Time and venue

15:00-16:30; Rich Mix venue 2, Bethnal Green

Labels: capitalism, class struggle, events, middle class, profits, ruling class, the complete and utter works of richard seymour, the rate of exploitation, working class

Thursday, February 10, 2011

The selfish gene turns racist posted by Richard Seymour

"I think it is well arguable that Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today. Pat Condell is one of the few with the courage to say so. Before condemning his ‘extremism’, at least consider the possibility that it may be justified."

I think it is well arguable that the bio-reductionism of Dawkins has always been inter-woven with a Thatcherite project of vicious, competitive individualism, egoistic bourgeois self-interest, and authoritarian national chauvinism, and now grounds an avowedly 'secularist' agenda which is a major vector for the revival of racism among middlebrow liberals who have already swallowed the neoliberal kool aid. I think it is more than arguable, an absolute certainty in fact, that Condell represents the rage of a post-imperialist white British middle class that has never adapted to its new circumstance. You can't tell jokes about paddies and blacks any more, because they'll get 'offended'. You can't tell the truth about Islam without some uppity leftie thug leaping to his feet to denounce you, before the Muslim interlopers trail you off to be beheaded. You can't tell a woman to shut up and do as she's told any more, without Andy Gray getting the sack. "Not in my country," Condell, Dawkins and their whole terrified, stupid, solipsistic, self-pitying troupe expostulate. So, resolutely, with considerable courage given the immense wealth and resources at the disposal of their opponents, they tell the truth that has been repressed for too long, that not all cultures are equal, that immigrants are rapists, that no one invited them here and they can fuck off if they don't like it, and that the British way-of-life-dammit is worth defending against these intruders. These people are no more secularists than Richard Desmond is a feminist. Dawkins doesn't embrace this ranting, reactionary idiot because he favours the separation of Church and State, but because his politics of resentment and Anglo-chauvinism (no surprises that Condell is a UKIP voter) chime with his own long-standing beliefs. These people represent the basest elements, the ordure, of an imperialist culture whose degeneration is spiralling now that the crisis is eating away at even the perks and security of middle class employment. And there is further still to go. The adventures of the selfish gene have not ended at this nadir, I am sure.

Labels: 'british values', 'secularism', british empire, britishness, dawkins, imperial ideology, islamophobia, middle class, nationalism, racism

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

The Blairite mantra posted by Richard Seymour

Keep huddling around the collapsing centre-ground:

Class has never been less relevant to how people vote. We are a culturally more cohesive society than we have ever been. From Ikea to Ryanair to X Factor, our way of life is converging...

Thus Tessa Jowell, whose way of life is more akin to those of the spivs who've just destroyed the global economy than that of the 'middle' she is assiduously courting. These people really have no idea how hated they are. Anyway, as this is nothing more than a regurgitation of a piece written by Peter Kellner, a Blairite married to Lady Ashton, here's one I prepared earlier.

Labels: berlusconi, blairites, class, elections, finance capital, middle class, neoliberalism, new labour, psephology, ruling class, spivs, working class

Friday, December 17, 2010

Class, orthodoxy and psephology posted by Richard Seymour

This is by way of being an extended footnote to some previous arguments. I have argued that the Tory base is dramatically narrowing in the UK due to social polarisation under late capitalism. Actually, John Ross has long been on this case, detecting its effects back in the early 1980s. This is due largely to the loss of mass support among the 'skilled working class' and the professional middle class. Their present strategy is thus about reorganising British capitalism and their position within it, so that they can restore their role as a hegemonic party of capital. At the same time, I've said, the centre ground is contracting under the impact of the gravest crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, such that - even if Clegg hadn't cuddled up to the Conservative leadership - the Liberals' nuptials with the electorate were always likely to be brief. Thirdly, I've argued that the crisis would present the possibility of an historic reversal of the split in the Labourist coalition. This of course depends upon the claim, widely rubbished in mainstream psephological literature, that class remains an important explanatory feature in voting behaviour.

The evidence that class motivates voting behaviour is actually very robust. Robert Anderson and Anthony Heath's study of class and voting in the UK between 1964 and 1997 looked in vain for real evidence of what psephologists call 'electoral dealignment'. Using their 7-grade 'social class' model (which is not unproblematic), they found the following correlation:

You can see the trend. The Tories' most ardent supporters are consistently among the petit-bourgeosie and the 'upper salariat' (which includes managers, professionals and administrators in large companies). Labour's core support is among manual workers, both skilled and unskilled. As I've pointed out before, this also holds for all general elections held since 1997. But this correlation would require further interrogation before it becomes an explanation.

For example, right-wing Labourites tend to insist that the working class core of Labour's vote is, though economically left-wing, socially conservative. This is their explanation for how voters in former Labour heartlands defect to the BNP - it's a socially conservative revolt of the 'white working class'. Thus, from their perspective, it is both necessary and true to the proletarian cause to spread racism and hatred toward immigrants and minorities. If this claim were accurate, the consistency with which the core working class vote has stayed with Labour through thick and thin, refusing the serenading of the Tories, and the fact that the BNP's inroads into working class communities are principally achieved by winning over former Tory voters, would present a real mystery. But it is not accurate. As other critical work has shown, social conservatism and liberalism have less to do with class than with cultural capital, ie education. Socially progressive attitudes are not an attribute of the rich, but of the educated; reactionary attitudes are not an attribute of the poor, but of the uneducated or poorly educated. This is why, for example, Cameron has had to adopt a more socially liberal facade. He can't win by wooing the know-nothing bigots of the petit-bourgeoisie. The Tories want to win back the sorts of professionals and skilled workers who have been to university and simply aren't up for deference and social authoritarianism.

***

Arguments for the demise of the relevance of class are hardly new. Throughout the postwar era, we were continually told that class was, in different ways, increasingly obsolete. Anthony Crosland argued from the Labour Right that the division between the management and ownership of capital meant that a direct conflict between workers and owners no longer existed. Instead, a new managerial class had taken over, and society was going to become a lot more stable as a consequence. In fact, Crosland was regurgitating the conclusions of American rightist political economy (Daniel Bell, James Burnham) and sociology (Talcott Parsons).

Communist Party member Sam Aaronovitch's terse polemic, The Ruling Class, was one of the better ripostes to that argument. Unfortunately, the salient points of Aaronovitch's later career would include the Alternative Economic Strategy (failure), Eurocommunism (failure) and a son called David (erm...). Subsequent research on class, for example by John Scott, also helped demolished this ideologeme. Even so, and all throughout the height of class conflict in the 1970s and 1980s, the Tories consistently argued that class was no longer relevant in the new meritocratic order. Thatcher, as a good Hayekian, argued that 'class' was a communist concept, and that to even talk of 'classlessness' was to concede the terrain in advance. In the same period, the emergence of But the argument that class was over really took off between the defeat of the miners and the collapse of the USSR, when Labour, the trade unions and the right-wing of the Communist Party were united in cognisance of the 'new times' and the need for a 'new realism'. It was in this period of reaction that the arguments for 'electoral dealignment' first came to the fore.

The new orthodoxy had it that class was losing its ability to produce solidaristic communities united in political struggles, due to the prolonged experience of relative affluence. As a consequence, class was being replaced by other, structural but non-class factors such as private vs public sector employment, wage earners vs the unemployed, home ownership vs renting, car ownership vs public transport users, and other sources of sectional or individual interest. At the same time, even those structural interests were giving way to 'issues' - voters now preferred to act as consumers, choosing parties based on issue preferences.

Marshall et al's Social Class in Modern Britain (1989) was a riposte to such arguments by way of an extended study of 'class consciousness' and its effects on political behaviour. It concluded that class remained the single most important structural factor in determining ideological conflict in Britain. But although it was far from alone in its findings, such studies tended to be buried under an avalanche of vulgar, triumphalist declarations that all conceptions of class - marxist, weberian, pluralist, etc. - were superfluous historical detritus. At its most sophisticated, this theory was expressed by Terry Clark and Seymour Lipset (1991), whose conclusions precipitated a surfeit of literature expanding on, and generally approving, the idea that social class has declined in relevance since WWII. On the conventional Alford Index, it was assumed that working class voters would side with leftist parties and middle class voters rightist ones, and it was on the perceived decline of 'class voting' on that index that Lipset and Clark staked their case.

There have always been

dissidents. In the UK, Geoffrey Evans has always maintained a sceptical defence of the relevance of 'social class', though not from a marxist perspective. His studies of voting, ideological conflict and class in the UK have been consistently inconvenient for those of the Blairite persuasion who would like to see class interred with the USSR. Psephologists like Anthony Heath have similarly argued that while the relative size of different 'social classes' may have altered, the relationship between social class and political attitudes remains firm. Others pointed out that the 'decline of class' thesis depended on crude measurements based on manual vs non-manual workers - the 'cultural/status' model of class which I've criticised elsewhere. And, as I've previously mentioned, the great unwashed generally seemed unconvinced by the decline of class, with supermajorities registering support for the view that there is a class war going on in this country.

But the pollsters whom the pundits listen to still want to cleave to orthodoxy, even when it manifestly fails to predict or explain real world political developments. This is one reason why the Miliband leadership has its occasional moments of interest. As much as he doesn't want to talk about the 'working class' in front of the capitalist media, instead restorting to euphemisms about the 'squeezed middle', his leadership pitch was explicitly based on asserting the centrality of reviving the working class base of Labour's coalition, and thus was a tacit recognition that the post-class ideology of the Third Way was moribund. And as the movement against the cuts springs into life, that opens up a space for all sorts of critical perspectives.

Labels: capitalism, class, class consciousness, class politics, elections, labour, liberals, middle class, psephology, ruling class, tories, working class

Monday, November 08, 2010

Cops who hate the working class posted by Richard Seymour

The popular BBC show, The Cops, was unusual in refusing to defer to the boys in blue. Cop shows are usually cheap to make, formulaic, and the police will give you a lot of assistance if it dovetails with their PR efforts. But actually the deference I speak of is suffocatingly omnipresent in contemporary crime fiction. Even the more cynical, wry, slightly left-field Scottish crime writers, such as Ian Rankin, Stuart Macbride and the more obviously political Christopher Brookmyre, tend to glamourise men and women who are basically administrators skilfully applying violence to resolve bureaucratic dilemmas. You have to turn to Irvine Welsh for a properly pungent deconstruction of the polis' unwarranted aura of righteous cool.

But The Cops was well-researched, and implicitly on the side of the working class people whom the police found themselves in conflict with. The show depicted police men and women without assuming that they should be glamorous, conscientious, or heroic. More often than not, they were anti-working class bigots. In one characteristic scene, set on a deprived estate, two police officers talk about how hated they are on the estate. One looks at a passing mother, with children, and says: "Look at 'em - breedin' like rabbits. I'm sick of them all. Dirty, thievin', lyin' scumbags. I'm sick of 'em." The police hated the programme, and withdrew their advisory role after the first series. Stories like this remind you that it isn't just fiction, and tell you a lot about the attitudes of the police, which are misleadingly described as 'canteen culture':

Hayley Adamson was hit by a police car which had been travelling at more than 90mph in a 30mph zone in Newcastle.

The 16-year-old was killed instantly and the accident provoked a hostile reaction from local youths in the working class area of Scotswood.

The driver, Pc John Dougal, had been pursuing a suspicious vehicle when the accident happened in May 2008.

Dougal was later convicted of causing death by dangerous driving and jailed for three years. The case led to heavy criticism of Northumbria Police.

Shortly after Hayley's death, it was revealed that a 'black box' computer fitted to the car had failed to record details of the officer's driving.

The force were also criticised in March this year after they put themselves forward for a public relations award over their handling of the media coverage of the case.

They later apologised to Hayley's family.

Now it has been revealed that a policewoman at the scene of the accident allegedly referred to Hayley as a 'Scotchie scumbag'.

Scotchie is a nickname for the Scotswood area, which is one of the region's most deprived areas.

As is usual with incidents where police are implicated in appalling, and perhaps revealing, conduct, leniency is sought, and all too often offered, on the grounds that the police have a difficult, stressful job. (There are a few examples in the comments thread below the cited article, among the usual batshittery). This neatly shifts the focus from the question of what is acceptable behaviour by public authorities, and more generally from what examples like this tell us about the authority in question, to the issue of extenuating circumstances, difficulties faced by people 'on the front line'. It also directs us also to instinctively take the side of the police officers in their daily conflicts, where it may not be sensible to do so.

It would be more appropriate to stick with the subject. Why would coppers behave like this, have these attitudes? Certainly, social authoritarianism comes with the job. And certainly, those sections of the working class who don't do what they're told would seem to pose a problem for the police. Their job is administer, to uphold the existing social relations and to ensure that their rules are not routinely breached. They would see their job, in a certain light, as being one of social control on deprived estates which suffer from higher rates of vandalism and property offenses. Because of the increased rate of confrontation between police and local people, especially young people, there is an antagonism and suspicion between them, so that the police are also less likely to get compliant cooperation out of the people on poor estates. The relationship between the police and working class populations thus reflects the broader social antagonism that they're a part of. Here, I don't accept the probably common view that the average bobby belongs to the working class. I think that the relationship of the policeman to the means of production is actually very similar to that of any middle class professional, in that they exert authority over the working class on behalf of the owners. In a word, cops are basically managers, junior managers, foremen and supervisors with big sticks and funny hats.

It is that situation which produces the conflicts that coppers face daily, which leads to them being spat on, yelled at in the streets, and hated by many, and which also leads to them roughing people up, killing people in custody, racially abusing suspects or non-suspects, harrassing kids, and so on. No doubt it is exhausting. No doubt the police man or woman goes home feeling tired, disgusted, emotionally drained, sick to the back teeth of the kinds of people they encounter everyday. No doubt this coarsening, hardening, grinding experience of daily confrontation leads to a certain contempt for political correctness and anything else which could be seen as hypocritical, pretentious or soft-headed. No doubt that is what leads to a police woman referring to a working class girl, killed moments ago by a fellow officer, as "scum". But there's nothing in this that redeems the police woman's motives, or mitigates the offence. Rather, it just calls for the casting of a wider net of critique.

Labels: capitalism, class society, middle class, police, police brutality, state

Wednesday, November 03, 2010

The class basis of US elections posted by Richard Seymour

The Democrats have lost the House of Representatives but kept the Senate by a slim margin. The Tea Party 'movement' will be credited for giving the Republicans this energy in the polls, but in fact there will be little evidence when the dust settles that anything particularly remarkable happened here. A few whack jobs got elected, quite a few didn't, turnout was probably around 40% (which will be hailed as a record high if true), and capitalism remains firmly in control of the political process. The dominant faction of the 'political class' will still comprise rich corporate lawyers, the majority of senators will still be millionaires, and Wall Street will still control the Treasury.

The Republican sweep, announcing a "seismic shift", will be every bit as flimsy as the 'revolution' of 1994. This was when Gingrich's hard right rump took control of both houses of Congress for the first time in fifty years. They added 54 seats to their total in the House of Representatives (2010 equivalent: 36, with 14 undecided), while adding 8 senate seats to their total to gain the upper house (2010 equivalent, 5, with 3 undecided - and no prospect of gaining control of the upper house). But the 'Republican revolution' took place with the support of less than 20% of eligible voters, with a turnout of less than 40%. Many of the same personnel who drove that 'revolution', and drafted the 'Contract with America' that few read or understood, are now 'activists' in the Tea Party movement. The FT calls Dick Armey an 'activist', for christ's sake.

This change in the political composition of the elected chambers as a result of the 2010 mid-terms will be even less significant than the 1994 congressional elections. The GOP's 'surge' will be predicated on, again, just about a fifth of eligible voters. Bear in mind that voter eligibility is, thanks to a racist criminal justice system and voting laws that deprive convicted felons of the right to vote, biased against poor and black voters anyway. But it will be depicted as a populist upsurge against what is perceived to be a tax-and-spend administration with socialist, Muslim, Kenyan anti-colonialist roots. In fact, the Tea Party 'movement' will probably not have had the effect that the commentariat is looking for. It is the result not of 'grassroots' right-wing anger, but of class-conscious business intervention in the political process - particularly by the billionaire Koch brothers. The 'grassroots' that are mobilised tend to be whiter and wealthier than the population at large, and they are heavily dependent on the media to talk up their activities.

In reality, just as in Massachusetts in January, millions of Democratic voters will not have turned out. Obama and his supporters have relied on a strategy of condescendingly lecturing the base, telling them off for expecting too much, which is grotesque and pathetic. (He saved capitalism, you fools!) His staff, as well, have been known to insult the base, especially progressives, as idiots and morons for being furious over the healthcare sell-out. So, why would grassroots Dems mobilise for an elitist pro-Wall Street clique that treats them like dirt and tells them they should be grateful? More on this in a bit. The point is that voters, just like the Tea Party 'movement', and just like the Republican base, will be heavily skewed toward the whiter and the wealthier, and the majority of the working class will have been effectively squeezed out of the electoral system.

***

If we understand electoral politics as a particular expression of the class struggle in the US, the bizarre trends noted above can be comprehended better. First of all, the obvious. Unlike in much of the world, the United States does not have a party of labour, that is a party created by and rooted in the organised working class. The electoral system is entirely dominated by two pro-business parties. The Democrats have, since the 'New Deal', tended to gain from whatever votes are cast by the working class, and have ruthlessly and jealously guarded that advantage against all potential 'third party' rivals. But the correlation between class voting and Democratic voting declined in the post-war era. This has usually been measured by the gap between the number of 'working class' and 'middle class' voters supporting the Democrats in any given election. You subtract the percentage of the 'middle class' vote that backs the Democrats from the percentage of the 'working class' vote that backs the Democrats and you have a class voting index - the Alford Index. This is not particularly sophisticated, and tends to rely on simplistic, occupational grading models of class. But the results of applying it do disclose a trend, which is worth noting.

One study, which focused on white voters (because African Americans were for much of the relevant period prevented from voting in much of the country), noted that the gap in 1948 was 44%. In 1952 it was 20%. In 1960 it was 12%. In 1964 it was 19%. In 1968, it was 8%. And in 1972, it was 2%. This form of 'class voting' benefiting the Democrats is subject to considerable variation depending on the context. I suspect that it would have been relatively high in 2008 and relatively low in 2004, for example. But the secular trend is one of decline. And the declining relevance of this particular index of class to determining voter behaviour has been interpreted by the usual dirt - sorry, by some academics - as a decline in class voting as such. It's been tied into a broader claim about the demise of class as an important factor in American life, most notably by Terry Clark and Seymour Lipset. This is just the American version of 'electoral dealignment' theory, which became popular among psephologists in the UK in the 1980s, and it maintains that as class loses its social significance, voters become more like consumers, choosing electoral brands based on the values they associate with that brand.

More plausibly, it has been claimed that since the Goldwater campaign in 1964, the Republicans learned how to use 'culture wars' effectively to win over a sector of racist white wokers. This is arguably the very effect that Republicans were unable to produce in 2008. Thus, the 'southern strategy' using a fusion of racial and religious politics, helped depress the overall levels of class voting. But it's important not to exaggerate this. Most white workers still don't vote Republican. In most cases, a majority of them simply decline to vote. Further, 'class voting' in the sense of working class mobilisation for the Democrats was in decline well before the overthrow of segregation and the onset of the Nixonite 'southern strategy'. Most of the decline cannot be explained by racism. According to Michael Hout et al (1995) [pdf], adjusting the research to take account of advances in stratification and class theory, and using multivariate analyses rather than just the Alford Indez, produces a very different picture. They build on the approach of critical psephologists such as John Curtice and Anthony Heath in the UK to suggest that 'electoral realignment' is a more plausible description of the trends than 'electoral dealignment'. Class still profoundly determines voting behaviour, and it determines it all the more if you consider non-voting one form of that behaviour.

The study shows changes in the make-up and alignment of the electorate. The number of owners and proprietors has declined - perhaps as ownership becomes more concentrated. Meanwhile the number of professionals and managers has increased. There has been an overall increase in white collar non-managerial voters, the votes of unskilled and semi-skilled workers remain steady, and the representation of skilled workers has fallen sharply. So the class structure has been recomposed, and the electorate has changed accordingly. Secondly, when you look at the partisan preferences of different class, you see that skilled workers became less Democratic between 1948 and 1992, while white collar workers went from being modestly Republican to being strongly Democratic. Professionals became more Democratic, while owners and managers became strongly Republican. Finally, on turnout, you see that managers, professionals and owners are much more likely to vote in presidential elections than workers of all kinds. The study concludes "The gap between the turnout for professionals and for semiskilled and unskilled [workers] ... corresponds to a range of 77 percent to 40 percent (using 60 percent as the average turnout)."

***

Thus, you have an electoral system that vastly over-represents owners, managers and professionals, and under-represents the working class by a wide margin. Incidentally, there's no sign that education has any impact on this. The increase in high school and college education among 'lower socioeconomic groups' has not led to a corresponding increase in turnout. Other research looking at non-voting corroborates this picture. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon's classic study, The American Perception of Class, looked at voting and non-voting behaviour in the US, comparing it with the UK, for the period covering the Sixties and early Seventies. They found that voters who were most inclined to self-identify as working class overwhelmingly voted for Labour in the UK, but overwhelmingly didn't vote in the US. By contrast, they found that more than two-thirds of supporters of the Democratic Party, which claims a near monopoly on all social forces left-of-centre in national elections, self-identified as middle class. Thus the perception of class, which Vanneman and Cannon show is strongly correlated to the reality of class, powerfully drives voting and non-voting behaviour.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward argued, in Why Americans Still Don't Vote, that the exclusion of the working class from elections is actively desired by politicians. They suggest that if politicians were interested in crafting a policy mix that would appeal to the poor, the poor would respond, and they would be able to command electoral majorities. Pippa Norris of Harvard University concurs: the evidence suggests that turnout among the working class will increase at elections if there are left and trade union based parties that are capable of mobilising them. But it is again worth stressing that the exclusion of the poor from the electoral system is not wholly voluntary. Thomas E Patterson, in The Vanishing Voter (2009), points out that the electoral system in the US has had a long tradition of seeking to exclude the uneducated and the poor, and Patterson argues that voter registration rules still work to limit the size and composition of the electorate. He notes that the US has a disproportionately high number of non-citizens among its total population (7%), and ineligible adults (10%). Thus, 17% of the total adult population at any given time is legally excluded from voting. The exclusion of so many voters is the result of deliberate projects: in one case to manage labour migration flows to benefit capital (non-citizens cause less trouble than those permitted to naturalise); and in the other case to construct a carceral state that imprisoned more poor and black Americans than ever before. On any given day, 1 in every 32 American adults is directly in the control of the criminal justice system, either through jail, parole, probation or community supervision. This only hints at the wider effects that this behemoth has on American society, but suffice to say that it deprives millions of the right to vote where it would easily make a significant difference to the outcome.

***

The 2010 mid-term elections have thus taken place not only without the participation of the majority of voters, but with the pronounced exclusion of millions of working class Americans and particularly African Americans. Don't believe me? Let's look at the exit poll results. You can see that there's a strong Democratic bias among voters with incomes under $50k, but they only represent 37% of the total vote, while making up just over 55% of the population. Those earning $100,000 or more make up more than a quarter of the vote (26%) and have a strong Republican bias, yet they represent less than 16% of the population. Breaking it down even further, 7% of the electorate is composed of those on $200,000 or more - again, strongly Republican - which is more than double their representation as a whole. In fact, I'm over-representing the higher income earners and under-representing lower income earners because I'm relying on figures for households rather than individuals. The percentage of individuals on $50k or less is 75%. Those on $100k or more make up just over 6% of the population. So, the turnout is enormously skewed in favour of the wealthy.

The two main parties will have constructed their electoral coalitions with a disproportionate reliance on professionals, owners, and managers. Their leading personnel, those who frame and carry through policy, will be bankers, laywers, and other members of the wealthy minority. Their daily consultations and coordinations will be with the industrial and financial lobbies who fund campaigns. And the "seismic shift", the "grassroots insurgency" that is supposedly propelling reactionary populists to the levers of power will have been effected principally by a relatively small shift in an already exclusive electoral system in favour of middle class and rich voters. I raise all this merely to put it in perspective. The drama of headlines, and of the vaunted new political eras, does not have much bearing on the real state of American society.

Lastly, the Tea Party. If these results are supposed to demonstrate the enormous clout of this movement, its great popular resonance, and so on, I am singularly unimpressed. They were up against a hugely unpopular Democratic Party, whose control of the executive has disappointed so many, amid a recession that has made everyone terrified. The economy is the number one issue in this election, and the numbers of voters who said they were optimistic about the future for the economy were tiny. If the Tea Party was such a wildly popular 'movement', it would not have contributed only a small fraction to the GOP's small slice of the voting age population. As dangerous as these creeps can be, as a Poujadist movement seeking to mobilise a mass base, it's a flop. And that's a key lesson of 2010.

Labels: 'obamamania', barack obama, capitalism, class struggle, democratic party, democrats, middle class, ruling class, us capitalism, us elections, working class

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Kellner's Blairite intervention in the Labour leadership race posted by Richard Seymour

This is among the more sophisticated arguments for a continuing Blairite approach for Labour's leadership, from a long-time Blairite and the current president of the Yougov polling organisation. (If I am not mistaken, Peter Kellner was a socialist back in the Seventies. He has been a Labour Party member since then, but is currently a Blairite and the husband of the Blairite politician Lady Ashton). It says, essentially, that the arguments of the younger Miliband brother that Labour has to win back its working class base are outmoded; the working class is outnumbered by the middle class; Labour's working class vote base for the first time was outnumbered by its middle class support in 2010; and class is no longer a determining factor in votes. A few points, then.

Firstly, Kellner uses figures relating the division of ABC1 and C2DE voters among the electorate to support his point that the number of 'working class' voters is declining precipitously. If he is right, then the proportion of 'working class' voters dropped from 51% to 43% between 1997 and 2010. That's a rapid rate of employment change, though - given the way New Labour allowed manufacturing industries to collapse and shed employment - not all that incredible. However, the conception of 'class' deployed by Kellner is the old, misleading 'social class' model preferred by market researchers. His 'classes' (ABC1 = middle class vs C2DE = working class) are based on the National Readership Survey classifications derived from official statistics. As he revealingly puts it, according to his conception the middle class are those who work primarily with their brains, the workers primarily with their hands.

This immediately raises the possibility that, far from class being a social reality that is being rapidly outlived, the NRS conceptions of "social class" are increasingly outmoded, inasmuch as their status and culture-based notions of class were ever relevant. The working class was never exclusively manual, though there was certainly a time when more workers were manual, and more of those worked in clerical jobs were middle class. But there was never any reason why that should remain the case. Indeed, accepting for the sake of argument that status and cultural indicators are what matter, then the rise of call centres a new working paradigm shows that non-manual labour can be just as menial, disempowering and poorly paid as manual labour. And for the record, call centre workers are traditionally classified as C1, or 'middle class', as are all junior or intermediate non-manual workers. What Kellner is talking about, without noticing it, is the recomposition of the working class. Another thing he doesn't notice is the absence of the ruling class in his statistics. They're just completely invisible, subsumed into the 'middle class majority'. And the third thing he doesn't notice is that most people don't appear to share his particular conception of class. The 2007 social attitudes survey found that 57% of people thought they belonged to the working class, whereas in 2005 the electorate supposedly comprised only 45% of people who were working class.

Secondly, even sticking with his definitions, there is a gap between his evidence and his assertions. For example, at the zenith of New Labour, the party won with the support of 8 million C2DE voters, and 5.5 million ABC1 voters. In 2010, Labour lost with the support of 4.4m ABC1 voters, and 4.2m C2DE voters. In other words, according to Kellner's definition, the support of the 'middle class' voters declined by some million voters, or about one fifth, while support among 'working class' voters declined by almost a half. If the numbers of votes from C2DE voters had even held at the historically low level of 6 million achieved in 2001, Labour would probably have defeated the Tories by a narrow margin. The collapse of support among 'working class' voters, most of whom did not defect to the Tories but either tried the Liberals, or a centre-left alternative, or (mostly) stopped voting, cost Labour victory in 2010. So, Kellner's conclusion that Labour should behave as if "class is dead" immediately confronts a problem: Labour has attempted to behave in exactly that way for more than a decade, and the result was a drastic contraction of its base, close to its all-time low in 1983 in terms of percentage, and well below 1983 in terms of the total vote.

Even with that in mind, granulating the 2010 results further, using some of Ipsos Mori's analysis (here and here), there is still a powerful 'social class' determinant in voting. Despite losing overall, Labour had the largest share of the vote among DE voters (approx. 40%), while its lowest share was among AB voters (approx. 26%). What happened between 1997 and 2010 was that Labour went from enjoying the support of 60% of DE voters to 40%, mainly because of a lower turnout among those voters, rather than because of shifting political loyalties. That points to another form of political behaviour, then, which is strongly determined by 'social class': non-voting. According to this review of non-voting in recent elections, the more 'middle class' the constituency the higher the turnout. Non-voting was once largely confined to the middle class in the UK, and did not represent political dissent. The same source linked above suggests that in recent elections, a growing number of people - in 2005 a clear majority - who did not vote had explicit political reasons for not voting. Working class Labour voters are increasingly boycotting the polls, and we can assume this is because they do not feel represented by Labour. Labour's relationship to 'working class' voters changed over the last decade or so, which caused it to lose in 2010. Even so, it still commanded a plurality among the poorest of voters.

Kellner says, as if to explain the allegedly declining relevance of 'class' to voting behaviour: "workers by hand (C2DE) and brain (ABC1) tend to visit the same shopping centres, use the same hospitals, grapple with the same mortgage-lenders, get stuck in the same traffic jams, subscribe to the same Sky packages and fret over the same taxes, crimes and insecurities". Thus is class declared "dead" as a political motivation. It is, of course, a fantasy - pseudo-sociology at its most glib. The one thing that is obvious from repeated sociological studies is that the majority at the bottom of the income and property scales have very different lives from those at the top - whether it is in terms of their health, education, experience of crime, consumption choices, need for benefits, access to credit, transport, exposure to taxation, etc.. Richard Wilkinson & Kate Pickett have assembled a mass of evidence on many of these indices, and Danny Dorling's research group has done some important work on the subject. You can watch him discuss social class in Britain today, here:

Social Class in Britain from Worldmapper on Vimeo.

Kellner's rhetorical effects are achieved largely by blithely gliding over huge social divergences in the UK, such that in the end we're all a large unhappy family of voters with "jaundiced" perceptions. Labour's job, then, would to be avoid references to class, win over the expanding 'middle class' and pursue centrist policies. The trouble is that such a strategy, the New Labour strategy, is unpopular with voters. It would only farther advance the contraction of Labour's base that has already taken place over the course of some four general elections. Above all, with the economy in dire straits and the centre vote collapsing, it would miss a unique opportunity to (however briefly) revive the Labour base and potentially overcome the divisions in the left-of-centre voting bloc that have been in evidence since 1983, and which have been devastating for Labour.

Labels: blair, blairites, capitalism, class, inequality, labour, middle class, new labour, ruling class, socialism, working class

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Liberals: the weak link in the coalition posted by Richard Seymour

Good to see further proof that the Liberals are the achilles heel of the ConDem coalition:

Today's voting intentions and Government approval ratings are the worst for the Conservatives since the election. The net Government approval rating is zero - 40% of people approve of the Government's performance, but 40% of people disapprove. On voting intention, the Conservative lead is down to 2 points, the lowest since the election campaign. Topline figures are CON 41%, LAB 39%, LIB DEM 12%.

Government approval has been on a slow downwards trajectory since its peak straight after the emergency budget in June. This has been partially down to Labour voters' hardening disapproval of the Government, and partially due to falling Liberal Democrat support. The remaining Liberal Democrat voters still say they approve of the Government's performance, but there are far fewer of them...

As the Yougov comment piece points out, the Tories have held up their support rather well so far - it's Liberal voters abandoning the party for Labour that is bringing down the coalition's support overall. My etch-a-sketch analysis: this is the inevitable result of the collapse of the centre ground as the opening shots of the cuts battle are heard. Liberal voters in Labour's former working class heartlands are probably deserting en masse, back to Labour. At the same time, middle class voters who have supported the Liberals in the past now feel better about supporting the Tories (because Clegg has lent Cameron his 'progressive' aura). What is more, they now have a decided class motivation to do so, since their income is invested in house prices, shares and speculation. If the Tories can rescue the City, and the housing market, they will win back much of the long-term loyalty lost in 1992.

I would be surprised, though, if the Tory support didn't also start to collapse very shortly, and Labour didn't end up with a clear lead. I suppose it depends on whether the Bank of England's polyanna-ish stance on spending cuts holds true, or whether the economists' sceptical stance proves more accurate in the end. It may also depend on whether Ed Miliband is the unelectable weirdo that I suspect he is, because he's probably going to win the Labour leadership contest.

Labels: class struggle, coalition, condem, labour, lib dems, middle class, new labour, ruling class, spending cuts, tories, welfare, working class

Friday, August 13, 2010

Myths of class posted by Richard Seymour

How do we come to our understandings of class? As bell hooks has argued, most of the pedagogy on such subjects is taking place at the level of culture, in the news, the films, the soaps, etc. For example, you learn from soaps like Eastenders that whatever class once meant, it is not an important structuring principle of people's lives.

This is simply because the characters get by without ever having to confront such issues. Even if the accents are ostentatiously proletarian, even if all the clothing, cultural and environmental markers are carefully chosen to depict a normal looking working class suburb, even if the subject is ostensibly a working class 'community', the reality of class is never allowed to pervade the lives of the often cartoonish, scheming, semi-criminal fraternity that exists around Albert Square. People are rarely shown working, and inasmuch as they do work, it is usually in small businesses, stalls, and other petty entrepreneurial outlets. There is no social space where a clash between workers and management might take place. There aren't mass redundancies, strikes, and wholesale social breakdown wrought by the closure of big local employers, which is a normal fate for urban centres in the UK.

What is true of Eastenders is not entirely true of Coronation Street, where there have in the past been regular scenes of class struggle in Mike Baldwin's sewing factory, in one instance featuring a victorious strike which ended with the women workers marching into the 'Rover's Return' pub chanting "the workers, united, will never be defeated!" Still, these are the exception. In contrast to the general suppression of class issues, there are regular homilies on race, sexuality and gender, though the soaps tend to handle these topics extremely badly. Eastenders' depiction of socially conservative "Muslim thugs" beating up a gay character named Christian (yeah) is a recent, poor example of a storyline that trades on a progressive angle for reactionary ends. This is not unrelated to the invisibility of class. If there is no social background that structures various forms of oppression, they can merely be treated as unfortunate prejudices or cultural atavisms. This is, of course, excellent material for spurious controversy.

But the cultural product is also shaped by officialdom, by politicians and bureaucrats, by the academics and intelligentsia, by the think-tanks and literati. To put it crudely, today's television writers were yesterday's students, and their fantasies of a post-class, individualist consumerist society (in which an actual, functioning, working class community is somehow mysteriously embedded) will undoubtedly have been shaped by the pedagogy of the state. Further to yesterday's Stakhanovite effort on New Labour mythologies, therefore, I recently came across an old essay by the sociologist Theo Nichols on the way in which official statistics shape our perception of class. Nichols' essay, 'Social Class: official, sociological and marxist', was published in a collective work by the marxist wing of the very excellent Radical Statistics Group, whose most recent journal contains this excellent demolition of the myth of self-segregating minorities. The book in question, Demystifying Social Statistics, is probably out of print, but second hand copies can be obtained for a few quid online, and it's well worth that price. The essay itself is concerned with how knowledge about class is produced in such a way as to provide potentially useful data for the capitalist state, but fails to properly situate class with respect to (capitalist) society's fundamental structures. Nichols argues for the importance of theory in accounts of class.

The way in which official statistics on 'social class' work is to produce purely descriptive categories based on certain outcomes, such as pay or occupation, without explaining them. These categories then shape the majority of research carried out on the topic, which has a profound effect on the production of knowledge. Thus, what most official and sociological work on 'social class' produces is an account of class-by-reference-to-conditions. Nicos Poulantzas, in Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, offered as an alternative a conception of class-by-reference-to-place, that is to the individual's situation within the division of labour. This obviously has structural functionalist implications oweing themselves to the influence of Louis Althusser, but the point of the example is that it's possible to discuss class in a way that is explanatory and not merely descriptive. (For what it's worth, Poulantzas' writing on this was an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of the conception of class deployed by Communist Parties in France and the UK, which tended toward social democratic conclusions.) The statistics appropriate to each level of analysis will perforce be different, Nichols argues.

The emergence of the concept of 'social class' in official censuses took shape in the 19th Century, settling in 1851 with a list of seventeen classes and sub-classes that were principally concerned with occupational status - imperial or local government, medicine, agriculture, religion, law, etc. In 1911, these classes were condensed into a system of social grades that are similar to the 'social classes' used by the Registrar-General today. These split society into grades of occupation, from professional to intermediate to skilled, partially skilled, and unskilled. There has, since 1951, also been a list of 17 socio-economic groups with no particular order or rank among them. Government surveys have tended to use a compressed version of these categories, which have sometimes been confused with social class. But the social grades are the closest to the contemporary definitions of social class, and are notable for omitting the actual ruling class, the owners of capital - something the national readership survey classifications are also notable for. What is the principle underlying these grades?

In 1928, the Statistical Officer at the General Register Office, argued against basing social class gradings on the income proxy, insisting that "any scheme of social class should take account of culture", which he felt occupational gradings had "a wholesome tendency to emphasise". The emphasis on culture in this sense, that is on status, is what distinguishes these official classifications from the marxist explanation of class as a relationship to the means of production. The census wording later explained that what was important about occupational groupings was "the general standing within the community of the occupations concerned" - that is, their status and their cultural prestige.

Building on the official conceptions of social class, sociologists also concerned themselves primarily with class-as-status, either in the sense of esteem, or in the sense of lifestyle. In this treatment, class is not only a descriptive (as opposed to explanatory) category, it is also static (as opposed to fluid and antagonistic). Nichols argued: "in so far as it concerns itself with hierarchic notions of social stratification (something which, incidentally, ties in with the stress on social mobility and studies of the recruitment to elites), it does not treat class relations as historical forces of explanatory power. Sociology gives us ‘social class’ in plenty, but along with political parties, race/ethnicity and various status rankings (for instance those based on educational qualification)—in fact it gives us many potential and actual bases of power, without the prior situation of these into class relations."

It is this treatment of class, in its myriad variations and elaborations, that produces the cultural, lifestyle-based ideas of social class that underpin the output of polling companies. It is this which leads to discussions of class based on the 'white collar' vs 'blue collar' dichotomy, in which a white collar profession is assumed to be 'middle class', no matter the situation of the worker with respect to the means of production. It is this which leads to constructions such as the 'underclass', the 'deserving poor' and the 'respectable poor'. It is this deliberately cultural conception of class, forged in the state bureaucracy, that leads to a curiously racialised, ethnicised discussion of class - as in 'chavs', the 'white working class', and so on. And it is this conception of class as a ladder of status and esteem that ties so neatly into 'aspirational', careerist ideology, obscuring the reality of class as a relational structure.

Labels: 'chav', capitalism, class, culture industry, knowledge production, marxism, middle class, ruling class, socialism, sociology, white working class, working class