Farewell to the Working Class?

Abstract

By the early 1980s, the class-centered politics of the socialisttradition was in crisis. In this situation, leading commentators tookapocalyptic tones. By the end of the 1980s, the Left remained deeplydivided between the advocates of change (“New Times”required new politics) and the defenders of the faith (class politicscould be practiced, mutatis mutandis, much as before). By themid-1990s the former had mainly carried the day. We wish to present thiscontemporary transformation not as the “death ofclass,” but as the passing of one particular type ofclass society, one marked by the process of working-class formationbetween the 1880s and 1940s and the resulting political alignment,reaching its apogee in the social democratic construction of the postwarsettlement. As long-term changes in the economy combined with the attackon Keynesianism in the politics of recession from the mid-1970s, theunity of the working class ceased to be available in the old andwell-tried way, as the natural ground of left-wing politics. While onedominant working-class collectivity went into decline (the classic maleproletarians of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry, withtheir associated forms of trade unionism and residential concentration),another slowly and unevenly materialized to take its place(predominantly female white-collar workers in services and all types ofpublic employment). But the operative unity of this new working-classaggregation—its active agency as an organized politicalpresence—is still very much in formation. To reclaim the politicalefficacy of the socialist tradition, some new vision of collectivepolitical agency will be needed, one imaginatively keyed to the emergingconditions of capitalist production and accumulation at the start of thetwenty-first century. Class needs to be reshaped, reassembled, put backtogether again in political ways. To use a Gramscian adage: The old hasbeen dying, but the new has yet to be born. Class decompositionis yet to be replaced by its opposite, the recomposition of class into anew and coherently shaped form.