Socialist Alternative: Is The Working Class Really a Revolutionary Class?
Published: 25/11/2006
Socialists argue that the working class needs to make a revolution to bring about a socialist society. But as soon as you say this you encounter an obvious objection: that the working class does not appear to be in a mad hurry to make a revolution. The supposed reasons for the apparent passivity of the working class are many and varied. That the working class in the West is too well-off. That the working class is trapped in a fog of media lies. That, with the decline of the blue-collar workforce, the working class doesn't exist in the way that it did in Marx's day.
What often underpins this pessimism is a romanticised idea of the past. People think of the Russian Revolution of 1917 or the stirring struggles of Spanish workers in the 1930s and believe that workers then were constantly itching to fight and that society was in a permanent state of turmoil.
This objection is nothing new. In 1907, the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce declared "Marx is definitely dead for mankind". The idea of a working class revolution belonged to the previous century and had no currency in the present! Every subsequent generation has had such wise sages who declared the class struggle dead.
But the class struggle, and with it the potential for revolution, happens regardless. Workers fight, not because they "believe" in the class struggle or because they have decided to make a revolution, but because the capitalist system forces them to. They fight because not to do so would mean losing everything that their parents fought so hard to gain. This remains as true today as it was when Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto.
The conditions of workers are obviously far better than they were in 1848. This is because workers are so much more productive today and because they have fought for 150 years to win those improvements. But it is not the absolute level of living standards that tells us whether workers will fight. It is the dynamic - backwards or forwards.
During the long economic boom from 1945 to 1975 the conditions of life for Western workers improved enormously. Working hours became steadily shorter and annual holidays longer. Many workers could afford to buy a house and a car for the first time. The economic pie expanded, allowing both bosses and workers to benefit from rising production.
Since the post-war boom ended in 1975, however, the bosses have been on the offensive to grab a larger share of the pie for themselves. And so in Europe and North America we have seen the welfare state shredded, longer working hours, a weakening of workers' rights, and a decline in the minimum wage.
In Australia in the past decade, the situation has been a little different. The Australian capitalist class has benefited from the resources boom and the growth of China, but the same underlying dynamic is present. Bosses are still on the attack and this ensures that for every apparent benefit there is a cost. We have more jobs and lower official unemployment, but many workers are in insecure jobs, part-time work or shunted off onto sickness benefits.
This applies to white-collar workers as much as to factory workers. The same monotonous jobs and driving supervisors that plagued the lives of factory workers in the 1950s now feature in the working lives of call centre workers today. Any teacher or health worker can tell you of the managerial surveillance that was once restricted to factory workers.
In this situation, workers must fight to hang on to what they've got. This doesn't mean that they will fight. In many situations, they will submit despite understanding only too well that they are being screwed. They may think that no-one will support them if they fight. Their union leaders may tell them that there is no point fighting.
But, sometimes when you least expect it, they do fight back. "Enough is enough" is their rallying cry. And so, around the world, whether it be childcare workers in Glasgow, textile workers in central China, car workers in São Paulo, or school teachers in Mexico, the working class starts to move.
And the class moves despite the ideas in workers' heads. The long term crisis of capitalism may make them disenchanted with the system in various ways, but they still hold on to many establishment ideas. Brazilian car workers strike for higher wages while still accepting that "our company need to be competitive". Mexican teachers occupy the streets while still accepting that "there needs to be the rule of law". In other words, workers' actions run ahead of their ideas and there may be a lag before their ideas catch up, if indeed they do at all.
Workers' ideas are the product of two factors: the brainwashing they receive from birth by teachers, parents, religious and political leaders and the media; and most importantly, their own daily circumstances.
For most of the time workers believe that they are relatively powerless to change anything about their lives. Especially in non-union workplaces, they are ruled by the boss. How in these circumstances can any worker believe that they have the power to change not just their own situation but to stop the war in Iraq, to save the public health system, still less to overturn capitalism!
But when workers are driven to fight, they begin to see that they do have power. They begin to understand that "competitiveness" is simply a capitalist ploy to extract more profits. They begin to understand the need to combat racism and sexism within their ranks. And so, often from small beginnings, they begin to learn vital lessons.
And sometimes the response from the authorities drives the process along at a still faster rate. When the workers of St Petersburg prostrated themselves before the Tsar for food and work in January 1905, the Tsar called out the armed guard who slaughtered more than a thousand of them. The very same night the workers went on the rampage and demanded guns. As one Russian socialist put it "Everywhere the masses were stirred out of their complacency: the old belief in the goodness of the 'little father', the Tsar, was gone. Even the most backward workers understood that much".
But the central point remains that, regardless of whether working class ideas catch up with their actions, they still fight. And when they fight they may call into question the very structures of society. This phenomenon has been noted in every upsurge of workers' struggle.
Long periods of passivity and political sluggishness give way to eruptions of struggle and political radicalisation. Such eruptions can happen when even the most astute political leaders least expect them to. In January 1917, just one month before Russian workers rose up and brought down the Tsar, Lenin told a group of young Swiss socialists: "We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution". In January 1968, socialists in France lamented the stifling conformism of their society. Four months later they were caught up in the whirlwind of the world's largest general strike until that date.
These outbreaks of struggle sometimes occur in even the most inauspicious circumstances - the big wave of mobilisation in 1973 by black workers of South Africa, which would eventually go on to crush apartheid, came after 20 years of defeat and inertia. The same was true in Indonesia in 1997 and Latin America today.
Does the working class still exist?
Much is made of the supposed decline of the working class. But the world working class is bigger today than ever before. Numbering nearly two billion, it dwarfs the infant working class of Marx's time. Blue collar and white collar alike, the working class is an ever larger proportion of the world's population.
And it is also far more widely spread. When Marx and Engels declared in 1848 "Workers of all lands unite", these lands were pretty restricted in number. Now workers are to be found on every continent. The rapid industrialisation of China in the past 25 years has seen the creation of factories that occupy acres of land, bringing together more than 20,000 workers.
The modern working class is in the process of being reconstituted and enlarged every day. The widespread attacks on their living standards force workers to fight back. Out of this resistance, the potential for revolution is put on the agenda.
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