The Attempt To Reclassify Parts Of The Working Class Cuts Both Ways, Both Stupidly

In the, often hysterical, world of the online discourse machine there’s been a great many key strokes expended upon what does and what does not constitute a worker. This is a very old debate in Marxist and pseudo Marxist circles and every time capital reorganises and creates new layers within the working class the debate erupts all over again. As early as the 1960’s some opportunists were arguing that the working class had been absorbed into the welfare-capitalist-consumerist world and therefore the only hope of revolution lay with those groups who had been excluded. This was most perfectly expressed (in all its lunacy) by Marcuse in ‘One Dimensional Man’ and ‘An Essay On Liberation’ in which he identified racial minorities, radical students and the lumpen-proletariat as the elements who would “spark” the revolution.

No surprisingly this line of argument, that the working class was no longer the revolutionary agent, was embraced by all manner of reactionaries. It was certainly emphasised by the strategists who designed the campaigns of Thatcher and Reagan. They were happy to argue along the same lines as Marcuse, stating that the working class were now part of the “shareholder democracy” and would own their own homes, have access to high quality consumer goods and not need the “old fashioned” trade unions anymore as they were now moving amongst the capitalists by being able to buy a few shares in British Telecom. By the 1990s the argument was taken to its logical endpoint by many bourgeois intellectuals who either argued that “we are all middle class now” or that working class could be defined purely on cultural grounds alone as the economic aspect had vanished. All of this is simply propaganda designed by the bourgeoisie in order to mask the fact that even though the economies of the imperialist nations had changed the structure of the working class had changed the nature of capitalism had not.

It is no surprise that the capitalist class would invest a lot of time and energy in trying to mask the wage labour relation and inventing very creative ways to lie about it. What is troubling is the sheer number of “marxists” who do similar things. The argument has reared it’s head again in two opposite ways recently. Since Trump picked up a significant (though often overstated) amount of votes from American workers in 2016 the US left has been arguing over how it should respond to this. Some have articulated the (entirely sensible) position that Marxists should find ways of reaching every kind of worker no matter what way they voted in the (largely symbolic) bourgeois elections. Other responded to this by hysterically denouncing any attempt at winning over those workers they condemned as a gang of “proto fascists” because they voted for Trump who the US left has identified as some king of 2nd coming of Hitler/Mussolini/Franco/insert Harry Potter reference.

All of this is incredibly stupid and ignores the most fundamental lessons left to us by Lenin, Stalin and Mao who’s experience on winning over workers with reactionary points of view rather out weighs our own. Lenin observed that the Bolsheviks even went to make appeals to those who had joined Black Hundred organisations. This is all necessary work if you are serious about making a revolution. The Chinese Communists had work with peasants who had grown up with incredibly backward and reactionary traditions such as the binding of women’s feet and much more. Within a few years though the CPC was able to convince the peasantry to drop such heinous traditions by living and working amongst them to the point where the peasantry trusted the party and its work. This is apparently unthinkable to the doyens of the extremely online left and their critics both of whom only wish to deal with certain sections of the working class that they consider to have proletarian legitimacy.

The leftist position is of course disastrous and should be criticised as such but those who have taken the opposite position have (at the very least) fallen into the same mistake. There are many who argue that the only “legitimate” workers are those engaged in the direct process of commodity production and distribution. Certainly it is the case that oil riggers, transportation workers and anyone working on a production line has more immediate industrial power than service sector of clerical staff. That has always been the case and it has also always been the case that there are different layers of the working class some with far more power than others. As the nature of the economies in the US imperialist block has changed the growth in service sector jobs has meant that those who can be defined as the productive working class have grown smaller. This has meant a growth in the service sector and of workers who exist on an endless series of short term and temporary contracts often working through agencies. This has been combined with the (highly profitable) fraud known as the “knowledge economy” which has seen vast numbers of people since the 1990s go through the university system. All it has meant in reality is a giant amount of debt for those who go through this system and that employers expect even lower paid bureaucratic or service sector workers to have a degree. Does possession of a degree take you out of the working class though? In most cases the answer would be, no. Most who obtain a degree will still only have the sale of their labour as a commodity in order to live. A very small minority will have access to the proceeds of exploitation as a result of being born into a bourgeois or petit bourgeois family but the overwhelming majority of those who go through the university system do not come from such families. There is a lot of propaganda from the bourgeoisie about how you become a “different class” when you finish a three year degree course but this is simply hot air. Most will have to rely upon the sale of their labour for the rest of their working lives regardless of how “special” they are told to feel because they put the letters “B.A.” after their names on official emails.

The job of communists is to cut through such propaganda put out there by the ruling class and to work to overcome the divisions that the capitalists deliberately foster within the proletariat. The degree holder who works in catering or in a bureaucratic job is a worker and communists must have ways in which to reach them and bring the most advanced of them into the party. The same applies to the productive working class and it is true that many “Marxist” organisations do all their recruitment from the former rather than the latter as they base themselves in student recruitment. This is clearly a dreadful mistake and must be rectified if any communist party is to succeed. The argument advanced by some in the (extremely online) Anglo “dissident” or “post” left, that we shouldn’t treat these workers as being part of the working class at all is as dangerous, short sighted and reactionary as the opposite argument from the likes of Jacobin. It gives way to all of the propaganda from the ruling class and accepts the dividing lines the bourgeoisie themselves try to place within our class. Those who argue for this “no true worker” position with regard to these layers of the working class are making their argument largely on aesthetic and ideological grounds. They see that the kind of ridiculous ideology of the petit-bourgeois leftist, filled with identitarian madness that dominates a lot of the activist layers in some of the union drives in companies like Starbucks and they recoil from it. An understandable reaction given the experience of the damage such petit-bourgeois leftist beliefs have had in recent years but one that is wrong and profoundly un-Marxist. If we are to overcome the propaganda of the bourgeoisie (of which IDpol is very a part) then we must be prepared to engage with sections of the working class who have fallen into this way of thinking.

Bourgeois ideology is very powerful and permeates many sectors of the working class and it comes in the form of avowedly right wing elements (racialism, imperialism, monarchism etc) and left wing (IDpol, liberalism, and social chauvinism) both of which a determined struggle must be waged against. If we cut ourselves off from any section of the working class because we associate them with a certain form of bourgeois ideology then we have effectively surrendered to the bourgeoisie and given up any hope of building new communist parties. We must be ready to draw from every section of the class (and even recruit defectors from the bourgeoisie) if we are serious about building the new Communist Parties which are required in this time of imperialist decay.