White Collar Employees and the Proletarian Identity
First Pravat Kar
Memorial Research (2000-2002)
Centre for Marxian
Studies, Jadavpur University and Pravat Kar Memorial Endowment
Kunal Chattopadhyay
Preface
The research
project on White Collar Employees and the Proletarian Identity was begun
two years ago as the first research project funded by the Prabhat Kar Memorial
Endowment, a unique endowment, made by the All India Bank Employees Association
to Jadavpur University for academic research on issues of interest to the
working class and other toiling people. It is appropriate to record one’s
appreciation of their progressive approach to the interaction between
professional academic work and the class struggle. The scheme as originally conceived,
is a massive one, and this project report only makes an initial contribution.
The basic aim of the project was to examine how white-collar work has been
studied in both Marxist and non-Marxist literature, and how white-collar
employees themselves think and act. The study of the vast literature itself
took up most of the time of the present researcher as well as the research
assistant engaged for the purpose. The original plan had called for a survey of
current literature from white-collar associations, a survey conducted among
white-collar workers/employees, interviews of white-collar union leaders and
activists, and a study of white-collar union building and strikes. By the end
of the first year, it had become obvious that this called for a major project
of longer duration, and with considerably greater funds and time devoted to it.
The present work was viewed as a preliminary one that would create the
theoretical framework for such a larger study. One has in mind studies like
those of Eric Olin Wright’s work at the University of Michigan and the Maisons
des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris, which covered a survey based on a prior
theoretical exercise concerning white-collar and other categories over a period
of several years.
The present
report consists of one major essay, along with two appendices. The essay begins
with the views of Karl Marx and Max Weber on class, since most modern work on
class has been influenced by either or both of them. This is followed by a
study of some of the important debates on white-collar work. Much attention has
been paid to a mid-20th Century Marxist debate on class, because
that was when the issue of white-collar as well as intellectual labour suddenly
came into prominence in Marxist circles. This has been followed by an attempt
at defining working class in Marxist terms, but keeping in mind post-Marx work,
not merely the writings of Marx. Two issues discussed in some detail are the
nature of intellectual labour, and the productive labour/ unproductive labour
divide. How far white-collar employees constitute a separate class is taken up
next. In this connection, we have discussed the impact of changing technology
on the working class. If one were to accept a definition of the proletariat as
that class which was in existence in Britain after the first industrial
revolution, at around the time Marx was writing the Communist Manifesto,
not only the white-collar workers, but large sections of blue-collar workers
would be excluded. My favourite examples come from the US, though examples can
also be given from India. Dianne Feeley, one of the editors of the widely
respected Socialist monthly Against the Current, and a leader of the
U.S. revolutionary socialist organisation Solidarity, is a worker at one of
Ford’s plants in Detroit. Another leader of Solidarity, Paul Le Blanc, is a
college teacher, and an internationally reputed scholar. Le Blanc defines
himself as working class. By the definition suggested just a few sentences
previously, not only Le Blanc, but even Feeley, who is capable of taking
vacations abroad, might be excluded. Popular notions of the proletariat as
propertyless confuses between proprietorship and control over means of
production and ownership of consumer goods. The car-driving proletariat of
Detroit, Chicago, New York or San Francisco is essential to the health of the
current capitalist set-up in the USA. In the same way, learning computer work
either in college, or in the parallel educational centres like LCC, NIIT, etc,
and landing a job that means one has to wear suit, tie and polished black shoes
at work does not make the computer operators any less exploited or any less
proletarian. That, at least, is the argument presented in the section under
discussion.
One theory or
ideological position discussed at length is the view that social mobility under
late capitalism has been such that classes have either disappeared or have been
reduced greatly in importance. It has been argued that the theory and ideology
of social mobility has greater relevance to keeping the working class disunited
and sizeable segments kept in pursuit of personal, rather than collective
improvement. Two positions have been discussed – that the white-collar workers
are a new kind of the petty bourgeoisie, and that they are a “new middle class”.
Discarding both, it has been suggested that while a part of them are working
class, others have contradictory class locations, not encapsulated by either of
the two discarded formulae.
There are two
short appendices. Appendix–I cites a small selection of statements, from
leaflets, journal articles, etc, of white-collar employees, where the
identification with the proletariat is evident. While self-identity is not the
sole or main source – indeed it is often the most misleading – this is a
corroboration of the arguments of the report. It is also one of the areas where
further work needs to be done – by studying a wider range of documents of
white-collar employees. Appendix-II presents some findings of a pilot survey
conducted among 106 persons, mostly white-collar. This is absolutely
preliminary. A proper survey would have to cover a wider range of jobs and a
wider geographical terrain, as well as a much larger number of persons of both
sexes. The questions too would have to be refined and a number of additional
questions added. Nonetheless, the initial inferences are significant, for they
tend to confirm the arguments in the report. Finally, a bibliography has been
appended. This includes books and articles that have been cited, along with
others whose ideas have been used though specific citations do not occur. These
would in turn form the starting point for a larger study.
I would like to
take this opportunity to thank a number of persons. To the All India Bank
Employees Association and its representatives, for their generosity in setting
up such an endowment and in helping to run it smoothly. To Prof. Ashok Nath
Basu, Vice-Chancellor Jadavpur University, to Prof. Debes Chandra Chakraborty,
Coordinator, Centre for Marxian Studies, and to members of the CMS, for
encouragement they have given. Sri Gautam Sen, who was my research assistant,
did so much of the work that he should be considered my co-author rather than
as assistant. I also owe much thanks to students of the Department of History,
Jadavpur University, who have, as in other cases, been the first to be exposed
to the consequences of my researches. Questions and discussions in class,
particularly in the class on the Industrial Revolution, have greatly aided the
final writing.
White Collar Employees and the Proletarian Identity
The aim of this project was too investigate
the identity of the white–collar worker or employee. In other words, are
white-collar workers[1]
part of the proletariat? Or do they have a separate class location? As it will
be shown below, we are aware of the existence of a vast body of work done over
a century, and locate the present study as only a small contribution within
that field. In course of this study, a number of steps have been taken:
- A
careful scrutiny of Marx’s use of class, proletariat and working class,
and an examination of his views on white collar and similar groups.
- A
study of post-Marx theoretical views and an attempt to take a position
within the different and often conflicting views.
- A
study of contemporary literature, including the literature of associations
and unions.
- Conducting
a survey, based on a questionnaire, among white-collar employees. Given
the small scale of the current project, only about 100 such employees,
mostly from
Both in popular parlance, and in the writings of
white-collar workers themselves, an impression is found that white-collar
employees fall into a distinctive category called the middle class or new
middle class. In Bengali, it moves away from the ambiguous usage of ‘class” to
more explicitly a status definition: “madhyabitto” (lit. middle level wealth).
The divergent nomenclatures all have this in common that this category of
people is removed clearly from the ranks of the working class. For the moment,
we are concerned with theoretical debates on this question, to the exclusion of
social, political and historical reasons for the belief.
Marx and
Weber: Class and Status
The classic
controversy over class derives from the contrasting positions of Marx and
Weber. An explicit discussion of their respective positions is essential even
now for anyone wishing to follow discussions on classes in contemporary
sociological, historical and economic writings. Marx’s writings on class,
especially on the working class, are complex. At the very end of the unfinished
third volume of Capital when he was about to answer the question, “what
constitute a class’? he only had time to say the reply to this question
‘follows naturally from the reply to another question; namely :what makes wage
labourers, capitalists and landlords three’ great social classes?”[1]
There is no reason to conclude from this
that Marx was hazy about what constituted a class. But to understand the layers
of meaning in his usage of class, working class, proletarian, etc, we will have
to examine in some detail his writings on class, especially the working class.
As a matter of fact, often enough, Marx wrote about the working classes in the
plural. Thus, the most famous of all his programmatic statements about the
working class leads off: Considering that the emancipation of the working
classes is a task of the working classes themselves….[2]
Nor was this a slip. Marx’s writings show him visualising the
working classes and the proletariat in ways somewhat different from how others
were using the terms. On at least one occasion, Marx tried to make a clear
distinction between proletariat and working class. Marx, and the 19th
Century generally, had been much more relaxed in maters of precision in
political terminology, so it will be easy to trip him up in places.
Nonetheless, he did grow more inclined to precision, particularly in matters
relating to economic thinking. Prior to Marx, we see the word proletarian being
used as a broader term than worker. The original Roman proletarian implied such
a broad connotation. But Marx came to reverse the relationship between the two
words. In doing so, he was -- as in so
many other things – overturning accepted socialist doctrine and ideas. Thus, a
programmatic article of the Communist League, often attributed to Karl
Schapper, and written shortly before the Communist Manifesto, said: “In
present-day society proletarians are all those who cannot live on their
capital, the worker as well as the men of learning, the artist as well as the
petty-bourgeois…”[3]
Here the all-encompassing definition was intended chiefly to designate the
out-group, namely all the idlers, those who lived of their capital. This was a
terminological attempt to solve a real problem, which the twentieth century
would call variously, united front of all the exploited, proletarian hegemony,
and so on. Marx was however concerned with a more precise definition, because
of how he visualised the revolutionary process. In his theory, the proletariat
is the working class peculiar to the capitalist relations of production. It
does not include all those who work for a living, nor all those who do useful
or necessary work. It consists of workers whose livelihood depends on a wage
relationship with those who employ labour power, and who therefore produce
surplus value in the process of commodity production. So the proletariat does
not include all wageworkers. It did not include wage-workers employed by the
government who were not producing surplus value in the course of commodity
production. Even more important, from the point of view of the present study,
the proletariat did not consist, for Marx, only of industrial workers, or only
of manual workers, or only of workers at the point of production. The
proletariat did not consist, for Marx, only of workers producing tangible
commodities. Producers of services may also be producers of surplus value. A
teacher in one of the innumerable tutorial homes and other parallel coaching
business that dot India’s cities, when she or he is a salaried employee of the
organisers of the coaching centre who run it as a profit-making enterprise, is
a proletarian by Marx’s definition, though this is certainly a point to which
we will have to come back. Some of these points restrict the scope of the term,
others expand it. Let me bring out one final element of the definition from
Marx, which expands the scope of the proletariat considerably. The proletariat
is constituted by capitalist production. Thus, considered structurally, the
proletariat is not an individual (unless in exceptional cases) but a collective
– the collective labourer, or the collectivity of workers whose work taken
together produces a given commodity. It unites not only a number of workers,
but even more importantly, “hand” and “head” workers, or mental and manual
labourers. The value embodied in the commodity cannot be ascribed to only the
true proletarians whose hands show calluses, while those who sit in offices or
do other non-manual jobs are supposedly not contributors to the production of
the value embodied – and so, of course, of the surplus value. All of them are
proletarians. The fundamental antagonism
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, on which Marx bases his reading of
modern history and contemporary class struggle, has to do with production,
control of labour, appropriation of surplus value. It does not represent a
contradiction between gentlemen wearing suits and ties on one hand, and
horny-handed proletarians with patchwork, or shabby dresses, on the other. The
dhoti-clad karmachari appears as an intermediate category in such a
conception no doubt. But the conception itself is a reflection of the class
struggle. It represents a bourgeois view. The ruling class has certain
conceptions of class, which are basically stereotypes that justify their
assumption of superiority. This is one such assumption. And this assumption
remains a bourgeois assumption even when would be radical youth or their
mentors decide that all workers who do not work with their hands are
non-proletarians and need not be organised with the same seriousness; that is,
when alienated bourgeois who try to break with their class idealise this image.
Finally, it remains equally false and equally an ideological reflection, a
pressure of the ruling class, if you will, when working class elements accept
this definition.
Let us, however, put forward an example of a better understanding of
Marx for a more complex reason. By Marx’s usage, a salaried editor in a leading
publishing house is a proletarian, while a metalworker in an Ordnance Factory
is not, since the former produces surplus value and works in a concern geared
for profit, while the latter does not.
But these are evidently marginal cases, and they push us to examine
better the relationship between an economic stratum and its social role, and
from there to the relationship of this layer to the class struggle on the
political level. Here, it is evident, the editor of coffee table productions
will react in a way often much closer to the bourgeoisie, while the Ordnance
Factory metalworker is likely to display militancy. However, Marx has in mind a
historic tendency: “It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or
even the whole proletariat, at the given moment regards as its aim. It
is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with
this being, it will historically be compelled to do.”[4]
Though this was written by the young
Marx before his investigation of the nature of bourgeois society had proceeded
very far, it was clear enough in stressing that the polarised situation of
class versus class was no more than a historical expectation. Such a
polarisation occurs only in specific junctures, as the social conflicts
intensify. The language of class in
Though we will return to many of these themes later, here we need to
introduce Marx’s key protagonist. This was Max Weber. He argued that class is
much more differentiated than Marx had believed. And he emphasized that there
were processes whereby “objective” class positions may be overlaid by less
tangible social definitions. Like Marx, Weber never provided a systematic
survey of class, and we have to piece his ideas together. In his view, class was definable by “the
typical probability of 1. procuring goods 2. gaining a position in life and 3.
finding inner satisfactions, a probability which derives from the relative
control over goods and skills and from their income-producing uses within a
given economic order”.[7] Like Marx, Weber pointed to a basic division
between the propertied and the propertyless, but he also stressed the
importance of differences within each group. Life chances, and with that class
situations, would vary according to the different types of property that owners
possessed, and also according to the different kinds of services which those
without property could offer on the labour market. So class structure was not a
simple polarity but was instead highly differentiated.
Weber went on to argue that class position offered no necessary
basis for collective action; whether or not members of a class recognised
common interests and acted upon these was linked to general cultural
conditions.[8]
For Weber, the more universal source of conscious common identity was the
‘status group’, defined in terms of a specific, positive or negative social
estimation of honour and associated with a specific life-style.[9] Weber, however, was not as ‘Weberian’ as some
of his followers. Indeed, he remarked that “every technological repercussion
and economic transformation threatens stratification by status and pushes the
class situation into the foreground.”[10]
However, this is not to deny that Weber’s basic thrust was different. While he
accepts the importance of economic-based class relations within capitalism, he
diverges in crucial ways from Marx. Weberian theory focuses on the way in which
societal rewards are acquired, and the manner in which patterns of
acquisitions are determined by the market. Marx’s theory focuses on the manner
in which new values are created, and the social relationships arising out of
and sustaining this process of production. Weber does not see conflicts
emerging within the production process, but in the labour market.[11]
For Marx, by contrast, the wages struggle, while important, was only a
subsidiary manifestation of the antagonism between capital and labour. It is
also worth remembering that Marx had, long before the emergence of Weber,
identified the fundamental weakness of any definition of class on purely market
criteria: because of the ‘infinite fragmentation of interest and rank into
which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and
landlords’, any attempt to relate class to the ‘identity of revenues and
sources of revenues’ would imply the existence of an infinity of classes.[12]
This was a problem to which Weber could offer no theoretically coherent
solution. He recognised that if class and market were equated, a uniform class
situation existed only with unskilled and totally property less persons were
considered.[13]
But in order to impose some sort of order on the multiplicity of skills, job
opportunities, qualifications, etc, Weber was compelled to rely on the
conventional categories of everyday discourse. So, eventually, for Weber, the
white-collar employees came to be clubbed with intelligentsia, technicians, and
others, though his discomfort is noticeable, since he admits that there could
be considerable social differences. Nor does Weber offer any serious
explanation of this definition of class boundaries, showing why the
white-collar employees are excluded from the working class.[14]
According to his analysis of status groups,
the status situation might be ‘based on class status directly or related to it
in complex ways. It is not, however, determined by this alone..... Conversely,
social status may partly or even wholly determine class status, without
however, being identical with it. For Weber, status groups are normally
‘communities’ and peoples’ status situation includes every typical component of
the life fate of men that is determined by a specific, positive or negative,
social estimation of honour involving a specific style of life. In his opinion,
the decisive role of a “style of life” in status ‘honour’ means that status
groups are the specific bearers of all “conventions”. For Weber all
“stylisation” of life either originates in status groups or is at best
conserved by them’. He continues, ‘status groups are stratified according to
the principles of their consumption of goods as represented by special “styles
of life”. Reinhard Bendix, one of Weber’s greatest admirers rightly summarised,
“Weber’s approach conceived of society as an arena of competing status groups
each with its own economic interests, status honour, and orientation toward the
world and men. He used this perspective in his analysis of the landed
aristocracy, the rising bourgeoisie, the bureaucracy and the working class....”[15]
In concluding
this discussion on Weber, the following summary points may be made:
1. ‘Status’
stratification of the type considered by Weber plays no significant role in the
thought of Marx, who shows no interest in social stratification as such. In so
far as classes happen to be status groups and are stratified accordingly, it is
their class relationship that matters to Marx, rather than any stratification
according to status. Is this a defect in Marx? The answer to this question
depends on the value we attach to ‘social stratification’ as an instrument of
historical or sociological analysis. But - and this is my first point - Weber
in fact makes virtually no significant use of his ‘status groups’ in explaining
anything. I would argue that Weberian analysis is valuable in examining certain
social groups, such as the clergy in the European middle ages, or the Stalinist
bureaucracy in the USSR, former ‘People’s Democracies’, and even now in China,
North Korea etc. But these are in fact groups which do not fit clearly into any
Marxist class analysis.[16]
2. Weber’s use
of the term class as is evident is totally different from that of Marx. To me,
Weber’s notion of class is exceedingly vague and inherently incapable of
precise definition. As noted above, how are the boundaries of classes to be
ascertained? That is the essential question, and my point is that Weber fails
to provide an answer to it. Individuals, certainly, can be regarded as
‘stratified’, after a fashion, according to ‘economic position’ in general but
if we are to have stratified classes we need to be able to define their
respective boundaries in some way, even if we are prepared to allow for some
indeterminate borderline cases and do not wish to have hard-and-fast lines of
demarcation.
3. But it is my third contrast between the categories of Weber and
Marx which is by far the most important. The ‘status groups’ and even the
‘classes’ of Weber are not necessarily (like Marx’s classes) in any organic
relationship with one another, and consequently they are not dynamic in
character but merely lie side by side, so to speak, like numbers in a row.
Class in Marx’s sense, is essentially a relationship, and the members of any
one class are necessarily related as such, in different degrees, to those of
other classes. The members of a Weberian class or status group as such, on the
other hand, need not have any necessary relationship to the members of any
other class or status group as such, and even where a relationship exists
(except of course where the classes or status groups concerned happen to be
also classes in Marx’s sense), it will rarely involve anything more than
efforts by individuals to rise up in the social scale - a feature of human
society so general and obvious that it hardly helps us to understand or explain
anything except in the most trite and innocuous way. I have no wish to minimise
the importance which may sometimes attach to certain features of status in a
static situation - that is to say, when we are looking at a society as it is at
a given point in time, and not in a historical perspective, as a developing
organism. For example, members of a status group near one extreme of a
stratified social scale may seldom if ever marry members of another such group
at the opposite end of the scale, and in India membership of one particular
type of closed status group, namely caste, may even involve contamination for
members of one caste who are involved in certain kinds of contact with members
of another.
Why should one prefer the Marxist to the Weberian concept of class,
or the concept of class that is grounded explicitly in exploitation to the one
grounded in market-based life chances? Three reasons could be advanced. First,
the exploitation-centred class concept affirms the fact that production and
exchange are intrinsically linked, not merely contingently related. This has a
bearing on how we will examine the difference between clerks and managers. They
cannot be viewed simply in terms of their position in the market for certain
types of labour power (clerical, managerial), but also by their position within
the relations of domination in production. This also serves to remind us that
class relations are relations of power, not merely privilege. Secondly,
theorising the interests linked to classes as grounded in inherently
antagonistic and interdependent practices facilitates the analysis of social
conflict. A simple opposition of interests is not enough to explain active
conflict between two groups. Exploitation is a very important concept, because
it brings together an account of opposing interests with an account of the
rudimentary capacity for resistance. Because, ultimately, the exploiters depend
on the exploited for the realisation of their own interests. And this gives the
exploited an inherent capacity to rejoice. Finally, a class analysis
foregrounding exploitation, rather than market based life chances, implies that
classes can exist in non-market societies. In the Weberian analysis, serfs and
slaves would be status groups pure and simple, rather than classes. One might
argue that this same logic could be turned against my contention that the
relationship between the Stalinist bureaucracy and the Soviet, Chinese or East
European working class is the relationship between a non-class privileged group
and the workers. This debate cannot be resolved here.
Mid 20th
Century Discussions on Class In Marxist Thought
From the 60’s onward, specially during the
70’s and 80’s not only from within the pro-establishment camp, but also from
the anti-establishment camp there have been a series of theories to justify
that the working class is dying, if not dead. For example the Financial
Times political columnist commented, “there is a new class which outnumbers
either the stereotype of working class or the capitalist”. Nicos Poulantzas
drew the same conclusion when he argued that all white-collar employees and
even all non-productive manual workers are part of the new petty bourgeoisie.[17]
In considering the case of Poulantzas, the context must be kept clearly in
mind. The first point to note is that despite certain important differences
with Althusser, Poulantzas did his work within a ‘structuralist’ cast. While
this essay is not a proper place to pursue the broad controversies concerning
the nature and importance of Althusserian analysis, some comments are
necessary. A major premise is the relative autonomy of what ‘structuralist
Marxist’ writers used to call ‘theoretical practice’. This was the assertion
that intellectual analysis cannot proceed by means of an unmediated, direct
relationship with reality, but must be framed within a set of concepts and
assumptions. The analytical structure within which a particular theory or
argument is embedded was called a ‘problematic’ (problematique) – this was a
particular way of looking into reality, posing certain issues for consideration
and excluding others, and ensuring that the answers to the questions which were
posed would assume a particular form. A ‘social formation’ – i.e., the overall
social structure at a given historical moment – is distinct from the mode of
production. The mode of production is an abstraction, not having a real
existence. Or rather, several modes of production coexist within a social
formation, one being dominant. The social formation has to be analysed at a
variety of different levels, or instances, like the economic, political and
ideological. The categories and propositions appropriate for one level of
analysis are not necessarily applicable for the other.
This
methodological premise encourages a preoccupation with elaborating and defining
concepts and their theoretical interrelationship, often with minimal concern
for the evidence of the real world. Critics of structuralism accused them of
being sterile and jargon-ridden scholastics. They usually responded that their
critics failed to differentiate between empirical description and theoretical
analysis. Thus, in the famous Poulantzas- Miliband debate, the former insisted
that categories such as class, capitalism or surplus value cannot be simply
derived from or reduced to the evidence of patterns of interpersonal relations
within society. He insists on the necessity of “comprehending social classes
and the State as objective structures, and their relations as an objective
system of regular connections, a structure and system whose agents, “men”, are
in the words of Marx, “bearers” of it.”[18]
So people are not objectively part of the working class. There is no empirical
reality above ways of seeing. What is therefore important, at the second
moment, to note about Poulantzas is why he chose this trajectory. In the
Foreword to his book, he wrote clearly: “today it is more than ever the case
that an essential component of revolutionary strategy consists in knowing the
enemy well, and in being able to establish correct alliances.” Highly critical
of the French Communist Party for its opportunism, he insisted that a detailed
analysis of the function and interests of the so-called “new middle strata”
must precede any principled decision on the nature and limits of an alliance
between the workers’ movement and such groups. Apparently in an orthodox vein,
Poulantzas insisted that ownership/non-ownership of the means of production is
an insufficient criterion for class analysis, and what is needed is an
examination of whether a position involves performing productive labour. Now,
Serge Mallet, in expanding the boundaries of the working class, had used the
same notion. Yet we find Poulantzas using the notion to contract the working
class. This is because, as Ernest Mandel has indicated on several occasions,
while the notion of productive labour is of key importance in Marxist theory,
its meaning is ambiguous and has attracted intense controversy. The definition
offered by Poulantzas was extremely circumscribed and rather idiosyncratic. His
approach would exclude not only the white-collar workers, but also those who
work for the state or in private ‘service’ industries, since he insisted that
the proletarian has to be both direct producers of surplus value and directly
involved in material production. This of course flies in the face of examples
directly given by Marx. As he provided in one particularly explicit
illustration: “If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production
of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition
to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the
school proprietor. That the latter had laid out his capital in a teaching
factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation … to be a
productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck but a misfortune.”[19] For the moment, my point is that Marx, even
in the 19th Century, was capable of realising that surplus value is
produced through actions and by people whom Poulantzas would rule out a priori.
Poulantzas has many insightful comments in his discussions of the new middle
class or new petty bourgeoisie, for example in the discussion on the evidence
for polarisation within this “class” broadly defined by him. But this is then
done by falling back on bourgeois academic styles such as classification of
occupational groups. In the end, the procedure adopted by Poulantzas was a
species of politico-ideological Marxism which denied the repeated emphasis of
the founders of scientific socialism to the effect that in the final analysis,
the economic basis is the determining force. I hope to show below the close
similarities between the studies of Poulantzas and David Lockwood. But here, we
need to stress that Poulantzas allowed his anger at the opportunism of the
French Communist party to lead to a fudging of the economic analysis. In the
late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a somewhat parallel dispute within the
Fourth International. The Socialist Workers’ party of the
Who are included
in these white-collar employees to term them as a new class? Lumped together
under the general heading of ‘middle class’ or ‘middle strata’ is an
extraordinary heterogeneous collection of jobs -- company executives, senior
civil servants, school teachers, nurses, shorthand typists, engineers,
technicians, draughtsmen. What do these groups have in common? Why are they
lumped into a single and separate class? The reply is very ambiguous. Yet, the
most common tendency is to take some popular perspective like type of work
(mental), apparent lifestyle or pattern of consumption as common denominator.
A close scrutiny
will easily reveal that it is absurd to lump together all of them into the same
general classification. In reality the aforesaid ‘group of people’, who are
categorised into a single category or class embrace two distinct positions. At
one extreme, there are members of board and senior management who control the
means of production and labour process on behalf of the capitalist class; on
the other extreme, there are members of ‘lower categories’ i.e. clerks, nurses,
draughtsmen, technicians who of course in between these two extremes there are
those professionals and management staff who partially control the labour
process, and partially stand at the receiving end to obey orders of their
bosses.
For the time
being it is sufficient to dispute the lumping all these categories into a
single class identity. As the matter is more complicated than the first glance
reveals, we will cover this point later, in details.
Before examining
whether the white-collar employees constitute a definite class category, we
have to define class in general, and working class, in particular. Unless we
are able to draw the boundaries of the working class, we cannot ascertain
whether a part or whole section of the ‘salariat’ belongs to the working class.
Of course, in our discussion, we have to take into account the impact of new
technology especially automation and computerisation in the industry and the
consequent changes in the structure of the working class. While following Marx,
I will be concentrating often enough more on recent Marxist writers in the next
section, since my purpose here is less to restate Marx (something already done
partly above) and more to examine what Marxist methods should mean in today’s
world.
Class and
Class Struggle
There are many
ways of defining class which are often contradictory and sometimes overlapping.
It is not possible to go through, compare and come to a ‘true’ definition of
class, because, the concept and definition of class is historic as well as
dynamic. Yet, to understand overall class behaviour and class struggle in a
class ridden society, one has to develop a workable tool to differentiate one
class from another. What follows is a brief attempt at making a comparative
study of some further major attempts to define a class so that we can
understand the political and sociological behaviour of classes. Only in the
general frameworks these provide can we make sense of the debates over “white
collar”.
As a historian
and a teacher of Greek history, though I have important differences with him, I
have been much influenced by the works of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix. So let me
express my position through Croix’s statement which he makes at the beginning
of the chapter ‘Class Exploitation and Class Struggle’ in his book The Class
Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.
“It seems to me
hardly possible for anyone today to discuss problems of class, and above all
class struggle (or class conflict), in any society, modern or ancient in what
some people would call impartial or unbiased manner. I make no claim of
impartiality or lack of bias..... The criteria involved are in reality much
more subjective than is commonly admitted: in this field one man’s impartiality
is another man’s bias and it is often impossible to find an objective test to
resolve their disagreement”.[22]
At the same time
what Croix had reminded us is of paramount importance that, ‘the inevitability
of ideological bias does not free us from the responsibility to struggle for
maximum objectivity’. Let us try our best to attain that maximum objectivity.
Croix’s own
summary formulation is admirable.
“Class
as general concept (as distinct from a particular class) is essentially a
relationship; and class in Marx’s sense must be understood in close connection
with his fundamental concept of the relations of production, the social
relations into which men enter into the process of production, which find legal
expression to a large degree either as a property relations or as labour
relations. When the conditions of production, such as they are at any given
time, are controlled by a particular group, then we have a ‘class society’, the
classes being defined in terms of their relationship to the means and the
labour of production and to each other.” Croix further continues, “Some of the most
important means of production in the modern world - not only factory, but also
banks and finance houses, even railway and aircraft...indeed the essential
element, in the relations of production characteristic of a capitalist
economy”.[23]
Though I myself
intend to start out by accepting the definition given by Croix, I must admit
that I don’t insist that this definition is absolutely true or correct. Rather
I adhere to this definition as being close enough to satisfy the Marxist
framework as I understand it. I do agree
there have been and will be disagreements on the definition of class. But for
me, the test of the ‘correctness’ of the definition lies on the clarity: its
ability to correspond with the historical reality and its fruitfulness to reply
to the pertinent question raised in our research.
Croix continues:
“Class
(essentially a relationship) is the collective social expression of the fact of
exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure.
By exploitation I mean the appropriation of part of the product of the labour
of others. In a commodity producing society this is the appropriation of what
Marx called ‘surplus value’.
A class (a
particular class) is a group of persons in a community identified by their
position in the whole system of social production, defined above all according
to their relationship (primarily in terms of the degree of ownership or
control) to the conditions of production (that is to say, the means and labour
of production) and to other class. Legal positions (constitutional rights or,
to use the German term, ‘Rechsstellung’) is one of the factors that may help to
determine class; ....”[24][Parenthesis
and Emphasise in original]
Following this
definition, we can underline the objective nature of class. Class thus
conceived is not a mater of political line or direction. In other words, any
individual or a group of individuals (even all of them) may or may not be
wholly or partly conscious of his/her/their own identity and common interests
as a class; still according to our definition he/she/they belong to a
particular class objectively. It is not necessary to take up class war on one’s
own shoulder in order to be a member of a class. This is often misunderstood,
by Marxists, by people who use some aspects of Marx’s views, or by sociological
and other critics. There are many such mistakes. They will be understood better
if we add to Ste Croix’s definition a somewhat more complex and multi-layered
analysis by Ira Katznelson.[25]
Talking about classes in the context of capitalism, Katznelson proposes four
levels. The first level is the structure of capitalist economic development.
Capitalism is impossible without proletarianisation and the attendant, specific
mechanism of exploitation. At this level, since certain key properties are
shared by all capitalisms, we can propose such distinctions as collective
capital and collective labour, and productive and unproductive labour. It is at
this level that the model building of the mature Marx in his writings on the
critique of political economy must be tested against its competitor models. The
second level refers to the social organisation of society lived by actual
people in real social formations. This level includes such economic phenomena
as workplace social relations and labour markets, and a historical analysis of
their development are invaluable for understanding how the growth of capitalism
has proved capable of fostering many different kinds of workplaces and work. Of
course, the first two levels are closely linked. The debate between Poulantzas
and Eric Olin Wright suffers from the failure to recognize that despite their
proximity the two are ultimately distinct levels. At these two levels, class is
defined solely with reference to the position of its members in the economic
structure, their effective rights and duties within it. At this level, as G. A.
Cohen says, a person’s “consciousness, culture, and politics do not enter the definition
of his class position”.[26] The fourth level, as Katznelson sees it, is
the level of collective action.
Katznelson’s
attempt to differentiate between all
these levels is useful, in view of certain common misconceptions. For
example, Dahrendorf in his important work Class and Class Conflict in
Industrial Society, argued,
“The formation
of class always means the organisation of common interests in the sphere of
politics. The point needs to be emphasised. Classes are political groups united
by a common interest. The struggle between two classes is a political struggle.
We therefore speak of classes only in the realm of political conflict”[27].
This is a
misunderstanding of Marx’s argument about a class-in-itself versus a
class-for-itself. In The Poverty of Philosophy he wrote:
“Economic
conditions had first transformed the mass of the people of the country into
workers. The domination of capital has created for this mass a common
situation, common interests. This mass is thus already a class against capital,
but not yet for itself. The interests it defends become class interests. But
the struggle of class against class is a political struggle”.[28]
If one goes
carefully through the above passage, it would be absurd to conclude that for
Marx, the mass of workers is not a class at all, unless it is united and
self-conscious. What Marx is saying, one might say, is that while it is class
enough to be exploited in distinct ways, unless it becomes united and conscious
of its class interests it will fail to fight effectively against that
exploitation in any collective manner. In the same book, when Marx speaks of
the stage of class struggle at which ‘the proletariat is not yet sufficiently
developed to constitute itself as a class’, he surely does not mean class as an
objective entity, rather he must mean a class for itself. When he
continues ‘the very struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not
yet assumed a political character,’ he had two distinct classes: proletariat
and the bourgeoisie in his mind, who though engaged in day to day class
struggle have not assumed a political character.
That this
apparent contradiction of constituting a class and not yet a class is not any
problem in Marx’s head can be easily understood if it is placed beside another
great analysis of Marx in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
where he sets out to explain how the small peasants in one sense did and in
another did not form a class:
“Insofar as
millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate
their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of the other
classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the later, they form a class.
In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding
peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national
bond and no political organisations among them, they do not form a class.”[29]
[Emphasise mine]
Even more
important than Dahrendorf is the work by E. P. Thompson. On the very first page
of the Preface to his major work, The Making of the English Class, E.P.
Thompson, one of the most well-known twentieth-century Marxist historians
declared that “Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences
(inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as
between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from
(and usually opposed to) theirs.”[30]
It is evident that for Thompson, Marx’s ‘class for itself’ exists, and his
‘class in itself’ does not. Thompson’s work raises serious questions which
cannot be fully treated here. It is possible to make out a case that his actual
historical practice is more nuanced than some of the theoretical statements he
makes. For the moment, we shall restrict ourselves to those theoretical
statements. In course of these, he vigorously criticises the conception of
class as an objective identify.
“There is today
an ever- present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was not
Marx’s meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much
later day ‘Marxist’ writing. ‘It,’ the working class is assumed to have a real
existence, which can be defined almost mathematically - so many men who stand
in a certain relation to the means of production. Once this is assumed it
becomes possible to deduce the class-consciousness which it ought to have (but
seldom does have) if it was properly aware of its own position and real
interests. ... There cultural lags and distortions are a nuisance, so that it
is easy to pass from this to some theory of substitution: the party, sect or
theorist, who disclose class consciousness nor as it is, but as it ought to
be.”[31]
Thompson is
right to recognise class as a dynamic identify and he also rightly accuses the
notion of supremacy of theory, party or sect over the process of class being
conscious of its own interests and substituting the class by the party. But his
justifiable irritation with Stalinist and sectarian versions of Marxism or
Marxism-Leninism, whereby organisations and/or intellectuals claim to know
exactly how the class should behave in order to be a class, leads him to an
opposite type of simplification. For Marx, ‘class for itself’ is as real as
‘class in itself’, and it is a dynamic process going on in the capitalist
society to transform from later to former. In other words, to use Lenin’s
coinage, Thompson ‘had bent the stick’ to the other side too far in his
theoretical pronouncements, leading to his discarding Marx’s great
understanding on the working class and its historic role and mission.
Otherwise, how can Marx’s famous passage in The Holy Family where he
talks about objective compulsions on the proletariat (quoted earlier) be
explained? It is evident that to define and identify a class, Marx presupposed
the existence of a class as ‘being’ to study the dynamic behaviour of the
class.
Not only that,
Marx in his famous letter to Weydemeyer admitted, “Long before me bourgeois
historians had described the historical development of the class struggle and
bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes”[32].
This testifies that Marx did not put any pre-condition of unity and
consciousness to identify a class as a class. A further discussion of Thompson
is necessary, in a subsequent section. For the moment, I hope I have been able
to show that a direct reading of Marx, uncluttered by baggage drawn from other
writers, presents the view that classes have objective existence, but that such
“objective existence” is not what makes distinct classes act in distinct ways.
It is only through engagement in class conflict that they become aware of
themselves as classes. So class struggle is an important component of defining
a class. A class aware of itself as a class is certainly a class engaged in
class struggle, and those specific class struggle experiences will likely be
key to shaping the distinct features of the class. We hope we have already
established that the objective class position of an individual depends on his
or her relationship to the means of production. Class thus conceived is
objective, it is formed within the relations of productions and does not arise
from individual’s, consciousness. Indeed it may clash with the consciousness.
Marx’s model is thus one where classes exist in contradiction. Every ruling or
exploiting class also has one or more ruled and exploited classes. It is in
fact necessary, in understanding classes and class struggle, to understand the
distinctions between exploitative and non-exploitative oppressions. A social
group can be extremely oppressed without being exploited. But in the case of
such a group, genocide always remains an option.[33]
The difference between Native Americans (the so-called Red Indians) and blacks
in
With the
establishment of definition of class in general, we can now proceed to define
the working class in particular and draw its boundaries, so that we can reply
to our basic question. Where do the white-collar employees stand?
Definition of
the Working class
To define the
working class as a special class, we will follow the general arguments of
defining class. Lack of space will restrain us from any in-depth discussion of
the revolutionary potential of the working class, and its process of maturation
from ‘class in itself’ to ‘class for itself’. We will confine ourselves mainly
to define the working class to locate its boundaries objectively. The
discussion the revolutionary potential will come up, however, particularly in
connection with white collar workers and the claim that they are necessarily
less revolutionary.
Existence of a
class society presupposes that one or more classes, by virtue of their control
over the conditions of productions will be able to exploit -- that is
appropriate a surplus at the expense of the larger class or classes. And the
very existence of classes involves tension and conflict between the classes,
often termed as class struggle. It is the precise form of exploitation which is
the distinguishing feature of each form of society. Marx wrote essentially the
same in a more explicit way:
“The specific
economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out [ausgepumpt ] of the direct producers determines the
relationship between those who dominate and though who are in subjection [herrschafts und
knechtschaftsverhalbuis], as it grows directly out of
production itself and reacts upon it as a determining element in its turn. Upon
this, however, is founded the entire organisation of the economic community
which grows up out of the production relations themselves, and thereby at the
same time its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of
the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers - a
relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development
of the nature and method of labour and consequently of its social productivity
- which reveals the inner most secret, the hidden foundation of social
structure ....”[34]
On the basis of
this general understanding, a surplus can be obtained in various ways, which in
turn construct various class identities.
1. The surplus
can be extracted by the exploitation of wage labour, as in the modern
capitalist world.
2. Surplus can
be obtained from unfree labour which may be (a) slaves (b) serfs or (c) debt
bondspersons, or a combination of these,
3.A surplus can
be obtained by the letting of land and house property to leasehold tenants, in
return for some kind of rent, in money kind or services, or through taxes
levied by the state as the collective organ of the ruling class.
Describing the
essential features of the working class Marx wrote:
“Our
“proletariat” is economically none other than the wage labourer, who produces
and increases capital, and is thrown out on the street as soon as he is
superfluous for the needs of aggrandizement of “Monsieur capital” .....
Do the white-collar
workers belong to this section of the wageworkers which directly produces for
the capitalists surplus value? And if not, can they be excluded from the
boundary of the working class?
First of all,
let us admit candidly a large section of office workers if not all (e.g. book
keeper, accountants, cashier and other such categories) do not produce surplus
value, nor do they increase capital. On the contrary they subsist on the share
of surplus value created by the industrial working class in the production
sector. ‘Production and book keeping in the sphere of production remind as much
two different things as the cargo of a ship and the bill of lading.”[35]
Now let us come
to the complexity of distinction and interrelationship between productive and
non-productive labour. We need to begin by acknowledging the existence of grey
areas when demarcating these two types of labour.
Marx
differentiates productive labour from unproductive one as follows:
‘Productive
labour, in its meaning for capitalist production, is wage labour which,
exchanged against the variable part of capital.... reproduces not only this
part of capital (or the value of its own labour power), but in addition
produces surplus value for the capitalists.’[36] Unproductive labour, on the other hand, “is
labour which is not exchanged with capital, but directly with revenue,
that is with wages or profit.” [37][Emphasis
in original]
Marx argues that
a commercial capitalist who invests in these activities merely creates a claim
to the surplus value created elsewhere, and thus reduces the general rate of
profit. If the capitalists employ wage labourers this advance of capital
creates neither product nor value. It reduces the dimensions in which the
advanced capital functions productively. However, for Marx, wage-labour
employed to transport goods does create surplus-value since the use-value of
things is only materialised in their consumption, and their consumption
may necessitate a change of location of there things, hence may require an
additional process of production in the transport industry.
The above
understanding of productive and non-productive workers, of course, in no way
suggests that for Marx, all white collar workers were part of the unproductive
sector. In developing the concept of ‘the collective labourer’ Marx commented:
“The real lever
of the overall labour process is increasingly not the individual worker.
Instead, labour power socially combined and the various competing labour powers
which together form the entire production machine participate in very different
ways in the immediate process of making commodities...Some work better with
their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologists
etc., the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. An
ever-increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept
of productive labour, and those who perform it are classed as productive
workers, workers directly exploited by capital and subordinates its process of
production and expansion.”[38]
In Marx’s
analysis, there is no scope of excluding white collar employees, per se, for
belonging to a particular sociological category, from the ranks of the
productive worker. If a worker, irrespective of whether s/he works with hand or
with head belongs to the collective worker involved in producing commodities,
is a productive worker. Moreover, there is no evidence to conclude that for
Marx, only productive workers constitute the proletariat. On the contrary Marx
writes explicitly that the demarcation may not be precisely accurate; there may
be some gray and over-lapping areas, but that shouldn’t prevent us from
discussing the issue.
In one respect a
commercial employee is a wage-worker. In the first place, his labour power is
bought with the variable capital of the merchant, not with money expended as
revenue, and consequently it is not bought for private service, but for the
purpose of expanding the capital advance for it. In the second place, the value
of the labour power, and thus his wages, are determined as those of other
wage-workers, i.e., by the cost of the production and reproduction of his
specific labour-power, not by the product of his labour-power.
More on
intellectual labour
While studying
the evolution of division of labour between intellectual and physical one, Marx
observed:
“so far as the
labour force is purely individual, one and the same labourer unites in himself
all the functions of that later on become separated .... . Later on, they part
company and even become deadly foes. The product ceases to be the direct
product of the individual, and becomes social product, produced in common by a
collective labourer...”[39]
Thus physical
and mental labour, even if separated, remain associated in the labour process
in the form of ‘collective labourer’. Though the aggregate of workers produce a
particular commodity, for an individual worker, intellectual labour is
increasingly divorced from physical. But this separation has nothing to do with
putting these two groups of workers into separate class locations. For
instance, following an example given by Marx, janitors or floor sweepers have
nothing directly to do with working up the raw material, yet are just as much a
part of the ‘living production machine’ (i.e. the collective labourer) as are
the others. Without their active participation the whole production process
will come to a halt. So too “the worker engineer has yet another relation and
in the main works only with his brain” and so on, “but is also a part of the
collective labourer”.[40]
There is a lot
of confusion within the Marxist milieu regarding the location of labour in
general and intellectual labour in particular, in the unproductive sector. Here
one must note in particular that the label productive labourer, rather than
unproductive labourer, is not in the least honorific under capitalism. For
Marx, it is simply a way of distinguishing those labourers directly producing
surplus value and those who do not do that. Some scholars tend to exclude the
unproductive labourer from the boundaries of the working class; for them,
because that category of worker is not productive, they do not directly produce
surplus value for the capitalists, they should not be included within the
working class. But they fail to understand:
“The mass of the
individual merchant’s profits depends on the mass of capital that he can apply
in this process, and he can apply so much more of it in buying and selling, the
more the unpaid labour of his clerks. The very function, by virtue of which the
merchant’s money becomes capital, is largely done through his employees. The
unpaid labour of these clerks, while it does not create surplus value, enables
him to appropriate surplus value which in effect, amounts to the same thing
with respect to his capital. It is, therefore, a source of profit for him.”[41]
Marx brilliantly
illustrates further the role and location of intellectual labour, both
productive and unproductive,
“If we may take
an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a
schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the
heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor.
That the latter had laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead
of a in a sausage factory, does not alter [Here, one must note in parenthesis
that the label productive labourer, rather than unproductive laboruer, is not
in the least honorific under capitalism.] the relation .... to be a productive
labourer is therefore, not a piece of luck but a misfortune.” [42]
it is worth noting that Marx’s hypothetical schoolmaster teaches in a private
school. So what would be the position of school or college teachers when their
salaries are paid by the government? Discussing the views of the economist
Storch that professors and writers are necessarily productive because they
produce enlightenment, Marx retorted that they might also produce obscurantism.
Professors and poets, moralists and preachers, all produce real or imagined
use-values. But they do not produce commodities. Indeed, some or all of their
acivities may well be necessary for capitalism, still without being
commodities. A capitalist’s cook and the chef of a restaurant owned by the
capitalist both cook, and the former performs labour that has a direct use
value for the capitalist, but that does not mean the cook and the chef are the
same. Only the chef produces a commodity with exchange value.[43]
He had given similar examples in his notebook. “Actors are productive workers
in so far as they produce a play [in so far as they] increase their employer’s
wealth”.[44]
Commenting on
the prejudices of bourgeois economists, Marx remarked that they thought it was
insulting to call Aristotle an unproductive labourer, whereas in fact he would
have felt insulted being called any kind of labourer. But this does not mean
that intellectual labourers under capitalism are necessarily drones. For
scientists and technologists, for example, specifically those whose works
affect production, Marx introduces a distinct term. This is a category that he
calls allgemeine Arbeit (general labour), differentiating it from
gemeinschaftliche or collective labour. This category of labour is general
because of its general application, not merely to a given commodity or
labour-process but to all subsequent applications of labour in a given
labour-process. Through this means the productive power of ordinary collective
labour is increased.[45]
This intellectual labour Marx calls science – but in the German, the
term he uses has a wider connotation. The German Wissenschaft means
accumulated knowledge or know-how. But the value received by such scientists is
far below the value their works fetch for the capitalist. Rather different are
the ideologues – economists, philosophers, historians, political scientists,
who produce ideology in the pejorative sense used by Marx. In other
words, they produce ideas which can be used to mislead and confuse the
exploited, to justify the rule of the bourgeoisie, and so forth. Their
intellectual production has the same economic relation to the capitalist as the
work of the capitalist’s valet, cook, bodyguard or others who perform personal
services.
This picture,
however, changes with time. The nature of capitalist production having become
more complex, training of the wageworker becomes more complex. In a number of
cases, the capitalist class decides it to be more worthwhile to provide general
training than to take on trainees and provide them with on the job training.
The massive growth of Universities in the developed capitalist countries, and
subsequently in countries like
We may conclude following
Marx’s analysis that
1. “Both productive and unproductive
workers are exploited; both have unpaid labour extorted from them. The only
difference is that in the case of productive labour, unpaid labour time is
appropriated as surplus value; whereas in the case of unproductive labour,
unpaid labour merely reduces the costs to the capitalists of appropriating part
of the surplus value produced elsewhere…. In both cases, workers will be
dispossessed of control over their labour-process.”[46]
2. Whether it is the physical labourer or
the mental labourer, it does not make any difference to qualify anyone to be
workers or non-workers. It depends on the relationship of one to the means of
production and the overall labour process.
3. Finally we may accept the broad
definition put forward by Ernest Mandel:
“The defining
structural characteristic of the proletariat in Marx’s analysis of capitalism
is the socio-economic compulsion to sell one’s labour power. Included in the
proletariat, then, are not only manual industrial workers, but all unproductive
wage labourers who are subject to the same fundamental constraints:
non-ownership of means of production; lack of direct access to the means of
livelihood; insufficient money to purchase the means of livelihood without more
or less continuous sale of labour power.”[47]
White collar
employees - a separate class?
It is an undisputed fact that,
throughout the last century, the proportion of production workers in the
workforce has declined accompanied by the expansion of other forms of
employment. This is what has led to the theories about a new middle class, or
the white collar workers as a new class, and so on. The figures certainly show
a decline in the proportion of the blue-collar workers, or workers directly
engaged in production. Thus, for
Table
1 The Occupied population of Great Britain
 |
|||
 |
|||
Occupational Groups No. of persons in major groups Major occupational groups
as
(000s)
% of total occupied population
 |
1911 1921
1931 1951 1961
1971 1911 1921
1931 1951 1961
1971
Employers
& proprietors 1232 1318
1407 1117 1140
622 6.7 6.8
6.7 5.0 4.8 2.6
All
White Collar 3433 4094
4841 6948 8479
10405 18.7 21.2
23.0 30.9 35.9
42.7
Managers and 631
704 770 1245
1270 2085 3.4
3.6 3.7 5.5 5.4 8.6
Administrators
Higher professionals 184 196
240 435 718
928 1.0 1.0
1.1 1.9 3.0 3.8
Lower professionals 560 679
728 1059 1418
1880 3.1 3.5
3.5 4.7 6.0 7.7
and technicians
Foremen and 237 279
323 590 681
736 1.3 1.4
1.5 2.6 2.9 3.0
inspectors
Clerks 832 1256
1404 2341 2994
3412 4.5 6.5
6.7 10.4 12.7
14.0
Salespersons and 989 980
1376 1278 1398
1364 5.4 5.1
6.5 5.7 5.9 5.6
shop assistants
All
manual workers 13685 13920
14776 14450 14393
13343 74.6 72.0
70.3 64.2 59.3
54.7
Total occupied
population 18350 19332
21024 22515 23639
24370 100.0 100.0
100.0 100.0 100.0
100.0
This kind of
data, combined with a reading of working class quite at viriance with the one
presented above, has led many theoreticias, including many inclined to various
types of Marxism, to conclude that the working class is in decline and that the
historical observation made in the Communist Manifesto (that the society
as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two
great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat) is no
longer valid. A good number of books and articles have been published with the
titles which loudly speak for themselves. Andre Groz wrote a much-publicised
book with the bold title: Farewell to the Working Class.[49]
Financial Times produced a much heralded book, Strike Free: New
Industrial Relations in Britain.[50]
This is not a survey of all such titles, but it is perhaps worth commenting
that even staunch Marxist scholars like Ashok Rudra turned out articles along
such lines at a time when the disappearance of the working class was in the
air.
Gorz put forward
the straightforward analysis that changing technology meant that the working
class is finished. Eric Hosbawm in Marxism Today tried to argue that
since the manual working class, the core of the traditional socialist labour
parties is contracting and not expanding this could only countered by
‘alliances’ with the middle class.[51]
It is possible to reject Hobsbawm’s arguments as a new version of the typical
Stalinist ploy of alliance with sections of the so-called progressive
bourgeoisie. But such an offhand political response fails to address the
theoretical issues raised. Even if one took one’s stand as an orthodox Marxist
against a revisionist position, such a form of rejection suffers from the same
flaws as the Kautsky-type restatement of orthodoxy against Bernstein. They
refuse to look at changing reality and extend revolutionary strategy.
In a keynote
speech at the British Trade Union Congress, General and Municipal Workers Union
General Secretary John Edmonds harped on about ‘a new servant class’ which the
unions could not expect to organise. [52]
Whatever be the
occasion, reasoning and nomenclature utilised, all of these findings reached a
common conclusion - that the work force is splitting into two distinct classes
- one, a relatively small and declining working class and the other, a
relatively increasing new class, which is neither bourgeois nor proletariat. This
was explicitly summarised by Nicos Poulantzas in Classes in Contemporary
Capitalism. He argued, as we saw, that all white collar employees, and all
non-productive manual workers (for example: dustmen, and porters in a hospital)
are not part of the working class, but of the new petty bourgeoisie. His
justification of the claim rests on the idea that white collar employees,
because they perform intellectual rather than manual labour, are polarised
ideologically and politically in the direction of the bourgeoisie. This is true
even of those white-collar employees (technician and others) who are part of
the ‘collective worker’, The class is thus conceived not as objective, but
subjective identity, and makes ideology itself the decisive criterion of class.
It is at this
point that we can discuss the famous study of the white-collar workers by David
Lockwood. Lockwood uses Max Web’s concept of ‘status’ in his study of clerks, The
Blackcoated Worker. He argues that clerical workers cannot be regarded as
part of the proletariat because of their residually middle class ‘status
situation’. Interestingly, Lockwood in a way took up cudgels on behalf of the
white collar employees against those who thought they were insufficiently class
conscious.[53]
Lockwood’s central concern is to elucidate why there should be a divergence in
the class awareness of clerks and manual workers. So his starting point is that
clerks do exhibit distinctive attitudes towards their employers, trade unions
and political affairs; and an explanation for this is sought in objective
differences in their socio-economic location. Lockwood’s discussion is
structured around a distinction between market, work, and status situations.
Discussing the labour market, he stresses that the income advantages of clerical
workers are far from wholly eroded, and that they get a series of fringe
benefits which reinforce their privileged position vis-à-vis the manual
workers. But the organisation of work, according to him, is even more important
in creating major differences between the two groups. In previous eras, clerks
chiefly worked in small units and in close contact with their employers, who
normally offered salary and career advancement as rewards for individual
initiative and “loyalty”. Obviously, by the mid-20th century, the
coming of large-scale, bureaucratically administered offices had changed much
of this. But Lockwood maintained that clerical functions mostly remained
physically segregated from production activities, and argued that their work
environment and the resultant social relations inhibited clerks from
identifying their position ad interests with those of manual workers. Thus,
real differences in class position interact with the traditional
differentiation of status associated with popular notions of ‘white-collar’
employment. Though the changes in the nature of clerical work might have
attenuated some of the former claims to social prestige, he held that the
status distinctions remained very much in existence. Though Lockwood claimed to
be synthesizing Marx and Weber, the claim is dubious. His key focus on market
relations as a determinant of class was entirely derived from Weber. His
discussion of ‘work situation’ shows him dealing with a range of discrete
elements in work conditions, rather than with the nature and dynamics of the
capitalist labour process. His usage of the term “class situation” is
revealing. He deals, not with the relation between social groups, but with the
notion of class as an attribute intrinsic to the “position’ of particular
social groups. Anthony Giddens in The Class Structure of the Advanced
Societies (1981) likewise uses ‘market capacity’ to differentiate between
the white-collar employees and the workers. One major problem with all these
analyses, apart from any mentioned previously, is that they increasingly fly in
the face of concrete experiences of white-collar behaviour. To take an example
from India, in 1946,during an early white-collar strike, Geeta Mukherjee
recollected in an interview, the students of Calcutta had taken out a
procession in solidarity, and the striking employees greeted them, not by any
militant demonstration, but by showering flower petals, and when that was not
available, using strips of paper.[54]
This is a far cry from the late 20th-- early 21st century
white-collar agitation. Emphasising solely or primarily the issue of
consciousness, and defining consciousness in loaded terms, can have the effect
of producing completely misleading discussions of class.
One particularly
significant element of the changing pattern of white-collar work is the
gendered character of employment and the consequences. Lockwood noted the facts
clearly enough, and commented that the “black-coated” worker had become the
“white-bloused” worker.[55]
But he failed to recognise that this was part cause and part consequence of the
relative deflation of this type of work. In the developed countries, for
example, women were often transferred from the manual jobs to clerical jobs.
But that does not change the fundamental fact that they are compelled to sell
their labour power in order to survive. At work they have little or no control
over their work. In a country like
The attempt to
distinguish between white collar and blue collar employees on the basis of
ideology is deeply idealistic. Ideology is not ownership. Class identification
cannot change class location. To take a Wodehousian story, his footmen are
supporters of the Labour Party (in some of the stories, even of the communists)
while butlers are Tories. This of course does not turn the butlers into nobles.
In the same way, white-collar employees may identify themselves with
conservative ideologies and political parties, but that only indicates
ideological differences. If this logic were to be accepted and put into
practice then each sect calling itself Marxist would define its own proletariat
– namely, those who accept its version of class-consciousness.
Changing
structures of the Working Class due to Modern Technology
Throughout the
last century, especially second half of it there has been considerable change
in the structure and composition of the workforce. In general terms, the
effects of these changes contributed to the reduction of the proportion of
manual production workers and the increase in the relative number of engineers,
technicians, laboratory and research workers, office and clerical workers, and
workers in distribution and services, including government service. All these
non-manual workers, including officers and members of top management are heaped
together and designated by as ‘while collar employees’, and said to be belong
to a new class -- the middle class. The proponents of projecting white collar
employees as a separate class often base their theory in some common sense view
like status, occupation and income. However, an in-depth investigation easily
reveals the untenability of all these characteristics to define or locate a
class.
There may be
some apparent commonness among all sections of white-collar employees with
respect to their lifestyle, or pattern of consumption. They may own the same
set of consumer goods up to a certain point, like the same TV, fridge; they may
wear same type of clothing, or they may read same type of books and have an
often similar consumption of cultural products. This similar pattern of
consumption may be cited to conceal their different positions within the
overall relationships of power and privilege in society. On the other hand,
patterns of consumption are often dictated by the capitalists’ need to produce,
to sell and realise the surplus value, and therefore to drive for more widening
of the markets. In
Often occupation
is treated as the criteria to determine the class position. The protagonists of
occupation-led class theory fail to understand that an engineer may be
self-employed, top executive or, a rank-and-file design engineer (equivalent to
a skilled worker), the last one (who depends solely on the sale of his/her
labour-power, however skilled and who does not perform any managerial function)
obviously has a proletarian class position. Income is the third category which
(mis-)identifies ones class position. A small garage-owner may earn less than a
white-collar employee or skilled worker, but, whereas the income of the former
includes profit earned through the extraction of surplus value, the latter
solely depends on the sale of the labour-power for their livelihood.
Actually what
affects changes in the structure of the working class, stemming from
accelerated mechanisation and automation, produce on the degree of skill
demanded from workers in capitalist enterprises; whether automation leads
predominately to an upgrading or to a downgrading of wage earners.
To ascertain the
class position of white-collar employees, the technological changes in the
allocation of the workforce are to be carefully noted and examined in the
proper perspective.
1.A
hundred and twenty-five years ago clerks in
2. With the
development of modern large-scale machine industry, the importance of mental
labour increases steadily in production and especially in the preliminary
process (designing of machines etc.) and hence the number of people engaged in
it grows both absolutely and relatively.
3. In as much as
the division of labour constantly proceeds further, not only in various
enterprises, but on the scale of the whole of society, new trades and branches
of economy spring up and the limits of the concept of collective labour
previously discussed are extended accordingly.
4.Clerical and
distributive employees engaged in the process of circulation constitute a
specific detachment of the class of wageworkers. Unlike the industrial workers,
they take no direct part in production, yet their labour is essential to
capitalist reproduction, which could not proceed without circulation.
5. It is also
important to note that in the present day capitalism the differences between
factory and office and commercial workers with regards to their working and
living conditions are disappearing. Whereas in the late 19th century
the commercial and clerical worker’s wages were considerably higher than the
factory worker’s, the difference has all but disappeared. There are cases,
quite often, of clerks being paid less than certain categories of industrial
workers. And with the introduction of mechanisation and automation in the
offices, the work of clerical workers is rearranged in a fundamental way, with
mass employment and an impersonal, bureaucratic style.
6. The
rank-end-file salaried worker’s labour has gradually lost whatever creative
elements it had and is being depersonalised. In increasing measure they perform
monotonous mechanical operations accompanied by both nervous and physical
fatigue. The higher the level of technology the more this tendency is
manifested. This is true of workers of all sorts.
7. It is true
that the office and trade employees do not come in direct contact with the
means of production. Yet this does not mean that they do not belong to the same
class. It is not one’s union with the means of production, but one’s separation
from them, which is the hallmark of the proletariat.
8. Side by side,
if at the early stages of mechanisation, the manual skill of the machine
operation retains its significance, it is gradually relegated to the background
as the conveyor and semi automatic machine tools all exhaustively introduced.
There appear a large number of workers on the conveyor-belt whose labour is
monotonous, and devoid of any creative element. Thus, mechanisation is
accompanied by the downgrading of skills.
9. Another
essential category is that of maintenance workers possessing traditional skills
as well as greater general and technical knowledge. In other words, automation
reduced the importance of the manual skills required in manipulating the
subject of labour and enhanced that of the technical knowledge and skill
required to make machines and supervise production. This process continued at
all times. Computer operators and computer maintenance personnel becoming a
new, skilled expert proletariat is a case in mind. It might be argued that the
skills they possess mean they have greater autonomy and flexibility, and that
they should therefore not be treated as parts of the proletariat. The
creativity or the flexibility they have is not proof that they are
non-proletarians. A computer operator who ids given a particular job and is
asked to be creative in coming up with the end-product is ultimately under the
control of the management, who decide whether the work was properly creative or
not, based on the marketability of the product. The fact that such employees
sometimes sit in air-conditioned rooms or wear relatively expensive dresses
relate to the conditions of production and image/self-image of the company and
of the employees themselves.
The Marxist
concept of the ‘collective labourer’ is acquiring more importance in the course
of the development of capitalist production. As Marx put it:
“The product
ceases to be the direct product of the individual and becomes a social product,
produced by common by a collective labourer i.e. by a conclusion of workmen,
each of whom takes only a part, greater or less, in the manipulation of the
subject of their labour. As the cooperative character of the labour process
becomes more and more marked, so as a necessary consequence, does our notion of
productive labour and of its agent the productive labourer, become extended. In
order to labour productively, it is no longer necessary for you to do manual
work yourself; enough if you are an organ of the collective labourer, and
perform one of its subordinate functions.”[57]
The expansion of
the process of capitalist production or, in other words, its constant drive for
increasing the productivity of labour, in its turn, has the effect of extending
the boundaries of the working class, i.e. of the ‘collective labourer’, by proletarianising
persons engaged in occupations and professions who may have formerly not been a
part of the working class. “Accumulation of capital is therefore, increase of
the proletariat.” This can be tested with reference to the Post-World War II
long wave and the transformation of the labour force, for that is what gave
rise to the debate on white collar in the first place.
The reduction of
the turnover-time in the era under discussion was related to the acceleration
of technological innovations.[58]
This acceleration of technological innovation is a corollary of the systematic
application of science to production. Though such application is rooted in the
logic of the capitalist mode of production, it has not been continuously and
evenly bound up with the entire history of capitalism. On the contrary, Marx
pointed out in the Grundrisse that it initially penetrates very
gradually into that mode of production, and does not constitute the basis of
the historical development of machinery. As he stressed, it is only at a higher
stage of industrial capitalism that invention becomes a business.[59] It was only with the development of the
chemical and the electrical industries in late 19th century that
innovation became directly interlinked with scientific knowledge, and a
scientific training became essential for inventors. And it was only in late
capitalism that research and development was organised as a specific business.
The objective conditions for the acceleration of inventions were connected with
the Second World War and the subsequent post-war rearmament. Radar,
miniaturization of electronic equipment, new electronic components, nuclear
weapons and delivery systems, even the application of mathematics to problems
of economic organisation through operational research, all had their origins in
the wartime economy. As a result, company dominated organised research grew. By
1960 there were 5400 such research centres employing some 387,000 scientists.[60]
Like any other business, the business of research has the sole goal of profit
maximisation for the enterprise in question. The growth of research and
development in turn created a vast increase in the demand for educated
workers. Hence the ‘university
explosion’. By the end of the 1950s, 32.2%
of the 20-24 age group in the
The state
employees, whose number increased rapidly in post-independence
The theory of
social mobility
There are many
theoreticians both within and outside Marxist milieu who hold that the
capitalist society can be said to be divided into the bourgeoisie and the
proletariat only in the nineteenth century, the ‘century of poverty’. They base
their theory on common sense, rather then any historical study to ‘prove’ that
as the twentieth century is the ‘century of affluence’, it is witnessing an
equalisation of the workers and the capitalists, a vanishing of distinctions
concerning income and consumption. According to them in the nineteenth century
the workers indeed lived in extreme poverty and were truly proletarian in
status. They argue, the process of deproletarianisation in the last fifty or
sixty years has resulted in a major part of the working class merging with the
upper strata of society.
This misleading
classification has become the basis for propaganda about the alleged dwindling
of the working class. In fact, the reality is the opposite. In Labour and
Monopoly Capital Harry Bravermen argued that with the development of mass
production, work has become increasingly routinised. As a consequence, there
have been a continuing ‘proletarianisation’ of the labour force - despite the
apparent increase in ‘white collar’ employment.
On what do the
proponents of the ‘social mobility’ theory base their arguments? Their method
is exceedingly simple. They claim that Marx believed that the working class is
in a position to own only a few scraps of personal property and is doomed to
lose even those as capitalism develops. To this idea of their own fabrication
of ‘Marxism’ they contrast the fact that a considerable part of the workers not
only in the highly developed country like USA, but also in the developing
countries like India, own a certain amount and varieties of personal property:
furniture, radio, TV, Refrigerators and in some cases even automobiles and
houses (though mostly acquired through credit) and a small amount of savings,
sometimes invested in stocks and bonds. Along with the acquisition of these
type of properties, evidence of the gradual improvement of education and skills
are cited to prove that the proletarians are rapidly disappearing. Even if we
neglect the question of the number of workers having access to property and
education, their argument fails miserably. The crucial criterion to designate
masses of workers as proletarians is not the greater or lesser opportunities or
access the workers have to acquire personal property or relatively higher
education. The proponents and adherents of the ‘social mobility’ theory
consciously or unconsciously confuse personal property and private property in
the means of production and draw from this absurd premise a fallacious
conclusion which contradicts the real fact of life. The argument about working
class becoming lesser stakeholders through the ownership of stocks and bonds
cannot be discussed in detail here. But this would be as true of a worker at
one of
We have already
seen the proletariat is above all such an exploited class who cannot work for
itself without working for the capitalists; it cannot earn its livelihood
without enriching its social antagonist - the bourgeoisie. As a class deprived
of the means of production, the proletariat can win its sustenance only by
selling its labour power, that unique commodity which differs from all other
commodities for its ability not only to reproduce itself continuously but also
to yield to the bourgeois an ever growing mass of unpaid labour materialised in
the form of profit.
The readers may
note that this is not a case of defending Marx in retrospect. Marx himself
analysed long ago that, “in contradistinction.....to the case of other
commodities, there enters into the determination of the value of labour-power a
historical and moral element.’ Moreover, he stressed that, ‘the number and
extent’ of workers’ so-called necessary wants as the modes of satisfying them,
are themselves the product of historical development, and depend therefore to a
greater extent on the degree of civilisation of a country, more particularly on
the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of
comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed.’
What actually
happens is: the value of labour power varies from country to country, even
areas and branches to area and branches of capitalist production and
reproduction of labour power as a commodity. Changes in the value of
labour-power are also often uneven and contradictory. For example, on the one
hand, it tends to fall in as much as growing labour productivity is accompanied
by a reduction in the cost of the means of subsistence essential for the
production and reproduction of labour power. On the other, modern mechanised
and automated production, and the use of electronic devices, new source of
transport and communication require of the worker higher educational standard
and skill, which in turn involves greater expenditure and time on education,
which again raises the value of labour power.
The notion of
social mobility has however a great value in the functioning of the economy. In
actual fact, few workers move sufficiently up the social ladder. Paul Le Blanc,
a Marxist scholar and revolutionary socialist activist in the
Social mobility
does not mean, in actuality, the prospect of large chunks of workers moving up
personally through the social ladder to end their days a s petty bourgeois,
“new middle class’ or small capitalists. Since white-collar unions have been
repeatedly attacked, falsely, for drawing off all funds so that nothing is left
for development or for the poor, this is worth stressing. Wages of ordinary
white-collar workers do not form part of the surplus value distributed among
the elite and its hangers on. Now, the so-called reforms in
In order to
distinguish the specialists who get power as well, there have been several
efforts. Eric Olin Wright’s models have the problem of providing a static
picture. In addition, by combining relation to means of production with skills,
Wright in his newer versions ends up with a mixture of Marxist and Weberian
elements which seem less than satisfactory.[66] However, the attempt by the Ehrenreichs to
posit a Professional Managerial Class was not without value. They argued that
the PMC came into existence as part of the process described by Braverman – the
deskilling of manual work, the introduction of scientific management, the
domination of monopoly capital. As a result of this transformation, they
argued, the capitalist class found it necessary to have as an adjunct a class
specialising in the reproduction of capitalist class-relationships, a class
which is employed by capital, and which manages, controls and has authority
over labour without directly employing it.[67]
There are reasons why the argument as a whole is flawed and unacceptable. If
defining a class in terms of its functions (creation of capitalist
class-relations) is permissible, then it is a small step to say that bank and
post office employees are not the same as steel, coal, textile or jute workers.
For that matter one could then say that workers in the ordnance factories are a
class apart, because their labour allows the ruling class to maintain
capitalist class-relations. But the distinction between ownership and control
remains a valuable one. There is a danger of adopting an excessively simplistic
model of working class, whereby wage/salary earning would be the necessary and
sufficient condition for being part
of the proletariat. By this logic, Stalin, Mao, Brezhnev or other bureaucrats,
as well as top management in capitalist enterprises, all become part of the
proletariat. By this logic, the Railway Board officials and the Central
government bureaucrats who smashed the great railway general strike of 1974, or
the management of industries, are only
unwittingly serving their enemy class. In fact, in course of distinguishing
between various categories of white-collar workers, we can find out a rather
different fracture line than the colour of the collar. Ownership of the means
of production are certainly central to capitalism and the capitalist class. But
when class relations are viewed as relations of production, it should be
evident that the control over labour exercised by the management places them in
a different position. The necessity of separating these elements from ordinary
clerical or even ordinary ‘expert’ elements is important both as a matter of analysis,
and even more for political reasons. This will be discussed in a brief section
on white-collar unionism. Before that, however, a further discussion on
engineers, technicians and such ‘experts’ is needed.
Locus-standi
of the Engineers and Technicians
The popular
notion and common-sense belief is: the engineers and technicians belong to the
new middle class or petty bourgeois class, because they do supervisory work and
earn more than the average rank-and-file manual workers. Similarly, all
supervisory staff are often held to be different from ordinary clerical staff,
etc. The fallacy of the argument can be proved very easily.
It is true that
even during the middle of the last century the difficulties of getting an
education and the small number of qualified engineers and technicians
contributed to the fact that they were highly paid and were able to keep up
with the bourgeois in their mode of life. Not only that, those few ‘lucky’ had
been very close to the owners of the means of production i.e. the capitalists
and thus had drifted away from the proletarians.
Today the new
technology requires more people engaged predominantly in mental labour -
designers, engineers, physicists, chemists, technicians.... all groups of
workers essential in the preparatory stages as well as for controlling and
planning production process, in the technical sense. In the yesteryears the old
time engineer was usually the administrative manager of the enterprise. Today
the big factories employ hundreds of engineers and technicians performing
highly specialised technical functions.
Moreover there
is happening a profound change regarding the distinction between mental and
physical labour. On the one hand, technical progress requires more and more
traditional workers with greater scientific and technical knowledge. This has
already been discussed. The modern worker at an open-hearth furnace or
converter spends about half of his working time on computations, controlling
the production process and assessing the results of his labour. On the other
hand, many traditional office and distributive workers are being engaged with
computers and similar machines instead of pen and paper. Thus the classical
distinction and contradiction between manual and mental labour have been
undergoing such a profound change that the mental and manual labourers are
coming closer even to form a single struggle and platform.
The colossal
increase in the numbers of qualified engineers and technicians and the
extension of education have enabled the capitalists to pay less for their
labour. The gap between the general education level of the trained workers and
the technicians, between that of technician and the qualified engineer has
narrowed, thereby decreasing the value of labour power of these groups. The main
body of qualified engineers and technicians no longer enjoy the privilege more
or less close or similar to the capitalists; on the contrary, in modern
capitalism, they have a mode of life which approaches that of the proletariat.
The convergence
of the interests the qualified engineers, and technicians and those of the
factory workers contributes to a change in the ideology of the qualified
engineers and technicians as well as their attitude towards class struggle.
More and more engineers are being organised in a proletarian way and taking the
form of struggle usually taken by the working class.
The capitalists
and their apologists endeavour to convince the qualified engineers and
technicians that they are in a privileged position. So, their labour power is
called a ‘salary’ to distinguish it from the ‘wages’ of the proletariat. In
other words, a respectable mask disguises the relations of exploitation --
appropriation by the capitalists of the unpaid labour of the engineers and
technicians.
In reality, the
role of an overwhelming number of engineers and technicians remain the same as
those of the factory manual workers. They may be termed as high skill workers
who sell their labour power, who lack control over the overall labour process
and means of production. Thus, if Marx in his time defined the qualified
engineers and technicians as a section of the working class, it is even more
true in the present day capitalist society.
In the 19th
Century, a significant part of the engineers might have been managerial staff.
Throughout the 20th century, this picture was changing. Foremen and
technicians increasingly have less control over the ordinary workers, and a
less exalted place in the capitalist command hierarchy. One proof of this lies
in reports from labour struggles. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, major labour struggles, for example those connected with the Russian
revolution of 1917, or the post-war revolutionary wave in many European
countries, display a very intense hatred of foremen as direct and immediate
representatives of the rulers. Foremen being beaten up, material being poured
over their heads, foremen being put on wheelbarrows and dumped into
canals/rivers, reports of this sort are available.[68]
In countries where the organisation of production has proceeded further since
then, such hatred and antagonism are more often directed to other layers.
Contradictory
Class Position
From the
discussion above, it is clear that all the ‘wage’ or ‘salary’ earners, all the
white collar employees, including the top boss, the members of the board of
directors or all the members of the professions even if they get a salary do
not constitute a single class –neither the working class nor any other coherent
class. We have been arguing that neither is this absolute polarity with 50,000
(or some other small figure) rulers taking on the entire population the real
picture, nor, on the other hand, is it true that the working class is
diminishing and a different class named the white collar employees, the new petty
bourgeoisie, the new middle class, or simply the middle class, expanding.
As it was
discussed in the previous section, a thin layer of white collar employees,
though they too do not own the means of production and are paid salaries, have
major function to control and have authority over the whole labour process and
labourers. There should not be any hesitation to consider the uppermost tiers
of the so-called ‘salariat’ class as adjuncts of the ruling class. After all,
how would a Marxist classify a judge of the Supreme Court? Judges are paid
salaries. But are we to assume that a crucial state power function has been
handed over to the working class?
In contrast,
there are vast numbers of white collar employees who have been treated so far
as members of the working class, not only because they are salary/wage earners,
but also because they do not have control over their labour within the overall
labour process, and have to obey the orders of bosses and managers and work
under an authoritarian and disciplined system.
There are still
other sections of the white-collar employees (including professionals) who have
varying degrees of control over investments and resource-allocations, the
physical means of production, and labour power. This ranges from upper to lower
management, who exercise partial control over investment and
resource-allocation, and following the arguments made by Wright (though he has
himself moved away from them) they should be called people having contradictory
class position, because they possess some elements of the capitalist class and
some elements of the proletariat. One could argue that the petty bourgeoisie
are just such a category. But we are not talking of quite the same thing. In
his analysis of the petty bourgeoisie, Marx did talk of this class as being
simultaneously two types.
“The independent
peasant or handicraftsman is cut up into two persons. As owner of the means of
production he is capitalist; as labourer he is his own wage-labourer. As
capitalist he therefore pays himself wages and draws his profit on his capital;
that is to say, he exploits himself as wage-labourer, and pays himself, in the
surplus value, the tribute that labour owes to capital. Perhaps he also pays
himself a third portion as landowner (rent), in exactly the same way….”[69]
Because of this Janus-like character, the petty-bourgeoisie faces
both ways. When the line of demarcation
is between property owners and the propertyless, and when successful
mobilisations are carried out on that basis, it can be fierce guardians of
property rights and of the bourgeois order. Petty bourgeois mobilisations have
been the key to fascist, neo-fascist and populist politics.[70]
When, however, the contestation is between those who live by their own labour
and those who live off the labour of others, the petty bourgeoisie can discover
that it, too, is exploited by capital, that the distinctions between real and
formal subsumption notwithstanding, it is also an exploited class. In such
situations, it can be mobilised by the revolutionary proletariat.[71]In
the Manifesto, of course, Marx linked petty-bourgeois decline with the
industrial revolution and the continuous growth of entrepreneurial capitalism.
So, 154 years after the Manifesto how does the reality match? Is the
white-collar employee class a part of the petty bourgeoisie? If we look at the
long-term trends in self-employment in a number of developed capitalist
countries, the decline of the traditional petty bourgeoisie becomes evident. In
the
But obviously,
the features of the petty bourgeoisie, though deserving of deeper study, have
little to do with the contradictions of upper or middle white-collar, or PMC
type social layers. When Marx talks, in the passage from the Theories of
Surplus Value quoted above, about the petty bourgeois being a capitalist
who exploits himself/herself as a wage-labourer, it is of course an image that he
creates. The petty bourgeois shopkeeper feels himself/herself to be free,
one’s own boss, and neither exploited nor an exploiter. The contradictory
position of the layers now under discussion stem from the fact that they do in
fact receive wages, and yet have a degree of power that sets them apart from
the mass of workers.
While enjoying
independence and authority in varying degrees they also have to bide by the
discipline laid down by the capitalist authority, and have to live an uncertain
life like that of wage-labourers. In this context, one may argue (and of-course
in theoretical abstraction that is to be accepted) that even a skilled worker
not only enjoys certain control over labour process, but often enjoys certain
supervising power over unskilled, especially temporary workers.
Therefore, it is
better to view this layer of contradictory class position on a sliding scale or
with varying weightage. If we consider the total members of wage/salary earning
persons as a pyramid structure, those at the bottom have nil or negligible
control over the labour process and may be termed without qualification as the
proletarians. It does not matter whether he/she belongs to mental/manual
labourer. As one climbs up the ladder, the supervisory function increases,
(sometimes even just illusionary or fictitious), but upto a certain point,
his/her function remains subordinate or better to say subservient to the
overall labour process dictated by capitalist high command, he/she belongs to
the members of the working class. Still, his/her wage is determined by the
value of his/her labour-power, treated as a commodity. As one climbs further,
the supervising function increases, and after a certain point, a group of
supervising authorities (mainly professionals) cross a threshold to attain the
contradictory class position. These layers of ‘contradictory class position’
differ both from the capitalists and the proletariat by the degree of control
they have over the labour process, investment decisions and
resource-allocations. In this context, it may be pointed out that a design
engineer may not have any control or authority over the labour process while a
manager-engineer may enjoy certain authority to discipline his/her subordinate
workers, both white and blue collar worker.
As Wright had
pointed out in his earlier work, the large majority of white collar employees
have -- at most -- trivial autonomy on the job. So there is no reason for
excluding them from the ranks of the proletariat. But upper white-collar
employees and certain layers of “experts” exercise a degree of management function
that set them apart. The non-Marxist sociologist John Goldthorpe discussed the
relationship between this category and the ruling class in the following way:
“These
employees, in being typically engaged in the exercise of delegated authority or
in the application of specialised knowledge and expertise, operate in their
work tasks and roles with a distinctive degree of autonomy and discretion; and,
in direct consequence of the element of trust that is thus necessary in their
relationship with their employing organisation, they are accorded conditions of
employment which are also distinctive in the level and kind of rewards that are
involved.”[73]
Fixation of
salary in a graded way plays a crucial role in motivating the persons in top
management and contradictory class positions to behave in a responsible and
desired manner. The delegation of power to managers poses certain problems to
capital, in particular, the problem of ensuring that this power be used in
responsible and creative ways. It is not enough to ensure conformity of
managers to the bureaucratic rules of the corporation through repressive
controls; it is also important to stimulate responsible behaviour. Income, as
graded structure of bribes, is a crucial element in creating the motivational
inducements to such behaviour. And this implies that managers’ income will
contain an element above and beyond the cost of reproducing the value of
labour-power, i.e., they will be getting a share of the surplus value which
reflects their position as a contradictory location within class relations. At
the same time, thee are vital differences between managers and capitalists. Why
do managers come into exist and what functions do they perform? Unlike slavery,
feudalism, or the modes of production in ancient and medieval India, capitalism
is distinguished by the fact that on one hand, the workers are free, that is,
they are not compelled by law to produce for the ruling class, and second, that
they do not own any of the means of production and are therefore compelled to
sell their labour power regularly to capital. Given these two items, a third
feature immediately develops – the labour performed by workers for capital has
to be subject to the continuous supervision and control of capital. The
peasants in Mughal
Contradictory
class location also explains those in the upper reaches of the educational
process, to return to a point briefly made earlier. College and University
teachers are wage-labourers who depend on the continuous sale of their labour
power for survival. An argument has been made in recent years about the
upgradation of their status through enhancement of salary. The enhancement of
salary is real enough. One has only to go to an average University to see the
rapidly increasing number of cars owned by teachers, as one indicator of their
increased comfort level. But this has come along with increased control. The
recommendations of the Mehrotra and the Rastogi Commissions, along with other
measures by the UGC and the various state governments, have imposed longer
working hours, tighter control on what is taught and how it is taught. This
reflects the changing role of the bourgeois university in late 20th
and early 21st century
According to
Marx, non-productive labour means that though surplus labour is extracted, it
is not converted to surplus value. In other words, the non-productive labourer
too is an exploited labourer. People in contradictory class locations are often
different. Whether we call them the new middle class, the managerial-professional
class, or something else, they perform functions of capital, and are provided
earnings at levels that suggest they are getting part of the surplus. These
elements, the upper white-collar layers, have a different pattern of earning,
for they can fairly expect a continuous rise through personal (individual)
promotion and career improvement. Workers, both blue collar and ordinary white
collar, can expect such improvements only through collective action. Thus,
people within the contradictory class location are closer to the capitalists or
to the workers, depending on control functions, levels of earnings, mode of
life-improvement options, etc.
To repeat, the
contradictory-class-position does not only suggest a push and pull tendency
both towards the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it also suggests that this is
not a class per se, it is a heterogeneous layer produced and reproduced
continuously, that too in a contradictory fashion and on a sliding authority in
the capitalist system.
Of course, in
real life, there are no hard and fast boundaries between classes. These
boundaries are highly fluid changing continuously under the impact of diverse
economic and social factors.
Class and
Gender:
The discussion so far has been apparently
gender-neutral, and therefore, in actuality, tilted to masculinity. If this
appears a rather extreme assertion, let me make the following initial points.
First, there do not exist abstract persons, but concrete men and women. Even if
our use of language avoids referring to the worker as “he”, our assumptions
often silently go on uttering the masculine form. Secondly, we tend to talk
about the individual person as being working class, petty bourgeois, and so on,
and to go on silently expecting an identity between the class location of that
person and the class location of the entire family of that person. By and
large, however, this turns out to mean that we locate women in terms of their
fathers, husbands and sons, depending on their age, rather than in terms of
their own place in the production relations. In families where husbands and
wives are dual earners, there is much problem over examining their class
locations. At the same time, in cases where the wife is a non-earner, there
too, her location is a problem.
A key question is whether the family is
the unit of analysis or not. If it is, then a white-collar wife married to a
capitalist husband poses no analytical problem, for she belongs to the
capitalist class through her family. If we asked whether a worker husband
married to a petty-bourgeois wife would count as a petty bourgeois, then the
gendered assumption behind the earlier conclusion begins to become evident.
Wright’s study shows, however, that
cross-class marriages are reasonably heavily present. In the
Many of these issues were debated in the
wake of an article by John Goldthorpe. In his essay, entitled ‘Women and Class
Analysis: in Defence of the Conventional View’, he endorsed the controversial
view that the class of women is derived from the class of their husbands. So in
the case mentioned above, all such school teachers would be in the same
category as senior management, while male school teachers and unmarried and
self-supporting women school teachers would be in a different class. He argued
that the class position of women, even when employed, remained derivative,
being determined by the class position of heads of families (males).[76] Goldthorpe does not, of
course, deny that by and large, individuals, rather than families, fill jobs in
the capitalist economies. But he disputes that the class structure could be
treated as a relational map of the job structure. While it may be the case that the basic
material interests of people depend upon their relationship to the system of
production, it need not be the case that those interests depend primarily upon
their individual position within production. Insofar as families are units of
consumption in which incomes from all member of the family are pooled, then all
members of the family share the same material interests and thus are in the
same class, regardless of their individual jobs.
To claim that husbands and wives have
identical interests with respect to the gross income of the family is somewhat
like the argument which goes that capitalists and workers have identical
interest in maintaining the profitability of the firm (which, as long as
capitalism exists, is a logical sounding argument, but which in fact sets
worker against worker) and are therefore in the same category (which is
absolutely false). Amartya Sen presents data showing that in families under
conditions of poverty, there are often great inequalities in food distribution.[77] So even when we use such
a simple device as income to determine class (inadequacies of using income as a
measuring rod have been discussed earlier) it is evident that married women in
the labour force will have material interest in their own incomes and therefore distinct, individually based
class interests in their jobs. It might be argued that this constitutes gender
interest, but not class interest. This requires further analysis. But a few
preliminary points could be made. First, there is ample evidence that the proportion
of family budget brought in by the woman affects her bargaining power within
the family. Second, with divorce a fact if life, increasingly even in
A second general criticism of
Goldthorpe’s argument concerns his very narrow understanding of class
interests. As remarked above, class interests are not simply income-linked
issues. Even if married couples share a common consumption pattern, their location
in the workplace would set up differences. A typist burdened with extraworkload
a s her company hands out VRS would be placed in a radically different position
compared to her senior management husband.
Certainly, it could be argued that a dual-earning family where one
spouse is upper class is more likely to see moderate behaviour from the
subaltern class spouse. But that is an issue of class consciousness and class
struggle, not of being in a class.
Third, even at this level, Goldthorpe is
wrong to assume that families, not individuals are the units drawn into class
struggles. It is quite possible to imagine a situation where one spouse is a
union member and activist while the other is a petty bourgeois or a manager and
is hostile to unions. There exist studies in the advanced capitalist countries
where such situations have been traced by the scholars.[78] Certainly, it would be
unlikely for husbands and wives to fight openly on opposite sides of the
barricades and remain husbands and wives, but barring such extreme instances,
like the wife being a strike leader in a firm where the husband is a general manager,
in other contexts they could well be involved in different and even opposed
class formations.
Finally, Goldthorpe simply asserts that
because the economic fate of the family is more dependent on the husband’s job,
therefore the class location should be exclusively identified with that
job. When we are dealing with intermediate layers, with say the husband having
an upper white collar or contradictory class location and the wife having a
lower white collar or working class position, this is unlikely. In the advanced
countries, in a good number of dual-earning families the wife contributed a
significant share.
However, beyond all thee criticisms is
the problem that Goldthorpe seems to treat class like rooms in a hotel. People
come and occupy the rooms. The idea of relations between classes disappear. For
some people, obviously, the relations are mediated, not direct, for e.g.,
children. But for that very reason, married working women cannot be said to
have mediated relations. They are directly related to other members of their
class and to the opposite class. It could then in fact be argued that white
collar women employees who are married to men of other (significantly
different) social layers have their class psotion determined more by direct
than by mediated relations. Further study would necessitate building as model
with various controls and carrying out in depth surveys. Richard Sobel’s study
of white collar shows that the upper white collar in the
In place of a
conclusion:
The apparently
abstract and purely academic debate over the nature of white-collar work has
been revealed as a politically serious matter. Given the decline in the
proportion of people who can be classified as industrial workers in the 19th
Century sense in the developed capitalist countries, erroneous theories have
come up. On the right there has been the claim that class struggle and
political strategies based on class struggle are dead. On the ultra-left,
Maoism inspired the view that only the so-called third world was capable of
making revolutions. There were others, who believed that late capitalism could
produce its grave-diggers, but they would come from outside the working class.
In India, too, the reformism of the mainstream left, sliding into full scale
service to the bourgeoisie as it adapts to capitalist neoliberalism, has led to
recrudescence of ultraleft Maoism of the “People’s War” variety. Both of course
share the merit of eschewing class struggle by the proletariat. Our study of
class and the location of white collar workers reveal that labour under late
capitalism continues to be alienated labour, exploited labour. Modern labour
continues to have three key characteristics – centrality to the production
process (only living labour can help the further accumulation of capital),
alienation, and economic exploitation. These are also the objective roots of
the revolutionary potential of the working class. In the present essay, we have
consciously avoided long discussions of class-consciousness. However, at this
point, a few brief comments are indicated. Ordinary white-collar employees
organise in unions. In
So, we would say
that late capitalism strengthens the working class. It makes the working class
grow numerically, compelling layers that try to differentiate themselves to
become more and more proletarianised. The basic tensions between capital and
labour are reproduced in so-called middle-class, white-collar milieus.
Ultimately, this puts the struggle for socialism back on the agenda. But from
the consciousness here and now to a revolutionary struggle is a long story.
That needs to be studied separately. What needs to be avoided is the error of
thinking that since the consciousness of certain layers includes the idea that
they are bhadraloks or that they have a higher social status, therefore
those layers must be read out of the working class. This is what bourgeois
sociology would like to do, as well as bourgeois propagandists. This is also
what ultraleft tendencies often do, when they fail to quickly make headway in
recruiting from among the workers.
There is
however, no royal road to socialism. The experience of the 20th
Century is unambiguous. Substitutionism, the gaining of power on the backs of
peasants, or through the medium of a foreign army (China
or Vietnam for the first, East Europe for the second) does not lead to
socialism, at least if socialism is understood in Marx’s sense as the
self-emancipation of the working class. Instead, a bureaucratic dictatorship,
more or less hideous depending on the exact nature of its relationship to the
working class, takes over. Ultimately, in every case, that has meant the road
back to capitalism – either led by the so-called communist party (as in
[1] Though throughout
this paper the term ‘white collar workers/employees’ has been used, the term
has obvious racial, gender and cultural biases.With a vast female workforce,
wearing no collars, as well as the transformation of the dhoti and kurta clad babus
into species of salary earning wage workers needing inclusion in the category
under discussion, white collar is clearly too Western and masculine. But I have
been compelled to let it stand, since it has an acceptability.
[2] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works [hereafter
cited as MECW], vol 20,
[3] H. Forder, M. Hundt, J.
Kandel and S. Lewiowa (eds), Der Bund der Kommunisten: Dokumente und
Materialen, Berlin, 1970, volI, p.
504.
[4] MECW:4, p.37.
[5] MECW : 6, p.495.
[6]
For this strategy see Kunal Chattopadhyay, ‘Marx and the Origins of Permanent
Revolution’, J.U. Journal of History, vol.X, 1989-90; and M.
Lowy, The Politics of Combined end Uneven Development,
[7] Max Weber, Economy and Society,
[8] Ibid, p.929.
[9] Ibid, p. 932.
[10] Ibid, p. 938.
[11] Ibid, p.931.
[12] Capital, III, p.863.
[13] Economy and Society, p.302.
[14] Ibid. pp. 304-305. This arbitrary demarcation is also applied by
Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order,
[15] Bendix, quoted by G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in
the Ancient Greek World, London, 1981, pp.87-88.
[16] There have been attempts to argue that the Soviet bureaucracy was a
bureaucratic collectivist class (Schactman, Draper, Carter, Rizzi, Burnham), or
that it was state capitalist (Cliff, Bettelheim, others). The most effective
rebuttals have come from Ernest Mandel.
[17] See N. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism,
[18] Nicos Poulantzas, ‘The Problem of the Capitalist State’, in Robin
Blackburn, Ideology in Social Science, London, 1972, p.242. For a
relatively detached review of the issues involved in the Althusserain storm,
see
[19] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I,
[20] The entire history of the SWP and its split with the fourth
International is tied up with this debate. To spare the reader unnecessary
digressions, I am simply adding a few references here. My own detailed reading
is based on an examination of the International Internal Discussion Bulletins
of the Fourth International, the Discussion Bulletins and Party Organizers of
the SWP (USA), and public writings, like line documents and explanatory
articles by leaders of the Fourth International and the SWP. See in particular
the SWP resolutions on the
[21] Neue Zurcher Zeitung, 16 July, 1962.
[22] G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek
World, p.31.
[23] Ibid, p.32.
[24] Ibid, p.42.
[25] See Ira Katznelson, ‘Introduction’, in I. Katznelson and A. R.
Zolberg (eds), Working Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in
Western Europe and the United States,
[26] G. A. Cohen: Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence,
[27] R. Dahrendorf, Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial
Society,
[28] MECW:6, p.211.
[29] MECW: 11, pp.187-8. For a full treatment of Marx’s handling
of the peasantry as a class, see Kunal Chattopadhyay, ‘Marx, Engels and the
Peasant Question –1: The Peasantry as a Social Class’ ; J.U. Journal of
History, vol.V, 1984; ‘Marx, Engels and the Peasant Question –2: Towards a
Worker-Peasant Alliance’; Journal of History, vol.VII, 1986-87, pp. 143
– 170; ‘Marx, Engels and the Peasant Question –3 : The Experience of the French
Revolutions’, Journal of History, vol. VIII, 1987-88, pp. 71 - 90.
[30] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class,
[31] Ibid, p.10.
[32] Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, in K. Marx and F.
Engels, Selected Correspondence [henceforth MESC],
[33] For the long war on the native Americans, see Kunal Chattopadhyay,
'The Frontier, democracy and development: Space and Power in Capitalist
Development in the
[34] Marx – Engels Werke, Berlin, 1965, bd. XXV,
p.799.
[35] Capital, vol II, P 134, note.
[36] K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 1,
[37] Ibid, p.157.
[38] missing
[39] K. Marx, Capital, vol. I, p.508.
[40] K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, vol. II, p.398.
[41] K. Marx, Capital, III, p.292.
[42] K. Marx, Capital, I, p.509.
[43] K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value:I , p.278; K. Marx, Grundrisse,
English translation by Martin Nicolaus,
[44] K. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 328-9.
[45] K. Marx, Capital:III, p.81.
[46] Eric Olin Wright, Class, Crisis and the State,
[47] E. Mandel, ‘Introduction’ to K. Marx, Capital:I, Harmondsworth,
1976, p.47.
[48] Source: Robert Price and
[49] A. Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class,
[50] Philip Bassett, Strike Free: New Industrial Relations in
[51] Marxism Today, October 1982, p.11.
[52] See also his interview with Bea Campbell, Marxism Today,
September 1986.
[53] David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class
Consciousness,
[54] Geeta Mukherjee, interviewed by Soma Marik, 19 October 1999.
[55] David Lockwood, The Blackcoated Worker, p. 36.
[56] G. Carchedi, ‘on the Economic Identification of the New Middle
Class’, Economy and Society, 4(1), pp.1-86, 1975; C. Wright Mills, White
Collar, New York, 1951; F. Croner, Die Angestellten in der modernen
Gesselschaft, Frankfurt am-Main, 1954. The works of Dahrendorf and
Poulantzas have already been cited earlier.
[57] K. Marx, Capital III, p.294.
[58] On automation, see Friedrich Pollock, Automation,
[59] K. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 703-4.
[60] Leonard S. Silk, The Research Revolution,
[61] Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism,
[62] Paul le Blanc, A Short History of the U. S. Working Class,
Amherst, N.Y., 1999, pp. 9-10.
[63] Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream,
[64]
[65] ‘Calculated Benefits’, in The Telegraph,
[66] E. O. Wright, Class Counts,
[67] B. and J. Ehrenreich, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class’, in P.
Walker ed., Between Labour and Capital, Hassocks, 1979. The book is a
collection of articles over this issue, with articles in response to the
Ehrenreichs and their reply.
[68] See, for example S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd, Cambridge,
1983; D. Mandel, The Petrograd Workers' and the Fall of the Old Regime, New
York, 1984.
[69] Theories of Surplus Value: 1,pp.395-6.
[70] For the present writer’s analysis of the petty bourgeoisie and its
role in fascism, see K. Chattopadhyay, ‘The Fascist Upsurge’, in K.
Chattopadhyay, ed, The Genocidal Pogrom in Gujarat: Anatomy of Indian
Fascism,
[71] To avoid a digression in the text, I am adding in these notes a
brief comment. While it is true that the petty bourgeoisie, including the
peasantry, can be pulled in a revolutionary direction by the working class, the
strategy of popular frontism, which consists of alliances between working class
parties and bourgeois parties with petty bourgeois social bases, has the
opposite effect. It demobilises the working class in the name of setting an
advance limit on how far the class struggle can proceed without upsetting the
petty bourgeoisie. The makers of this strategy, from opportunists in late 19th
century, via the Stalinist strategy-makers of the Comintern in the Second
Chinese revolution and Dimitrov on to Hobsbawm or the CPI(M), deliberately
garble the issue. The task of a revolutionary alliance is to win over the petty
bourgeoisie to the revolution through a militant strategy, not an alliance with
so-called petty bourgeois parties that will become brakes on militancy.
[72] From E. O. Wright, Class Counts, Table 4.3, p. 124.
[73] J. Goldthorpe, ‘On the Service Class, its Formation and Future’, in
A. Giddens and G. Mackenzie (editors), Social Class and the Division of
Labour, pp. 168-169.
[74] E. O. Wright, Class Counts,p.227.
[75] Acker, J., ‘Women and Social Stratification: A Case of Intellectual
Sexism’, American Journal of Sociology 78, 4:936-945, 1973.
[76] John Goldthorpe, ‘Women and class Analysis: In Defence of the
Conventional View’, Sociology 17: 468-9, 1983.
[77] Amartya Sen, ‘Family and Food: Sex Bias in Poverty’, in Amartya
Sen, Resources, Values and Development,
[78] See for example C. Costello, We’re Worth It: Women and
Collective Action in the Insurance Workplace,
[79] Richard Sobel, The White Collar Working Class: From Structure to
Politics,
[80] See Robert Price, ‘Introduction’, to part II of Richard Hyman and
Robert Price eds, The New Working Class? White Collar Workers and their
Organisations,
[81] Com. P. S. Sundaresan, A
Trade Union Odyssey,
[82] Ibid., p.68.
Appendix - I
When they speak for themselves
An interesting
aspect of white-collar existence is that the majority of the leaders and the
ideologues within the white-collar employees’ movement do not always accept the
reality that they are parts of the working class. Rather there is a strong tendency to identify
the white-collar employees as a separate identity other than the working
class. We can talk about a number of
reasons for this unwillingness to accept the proletarian identity. First, in
every country there is a history of how the proletariat is formed and
re-formed. The first entry of Bhadraloks
in Calcutta's labour organisations is over a century old. During the swadeshi movement period, this
increased. The strike of clerks of Burn Company, Howrah, in September 1905,
protesting against a mechanical means of recording attendance times was
significant. But precisely because in Bengal for instance the white collar
employees came from a Bhadralok
background (i.e., petty landlord, or urban pseudo-landlord style origins), they
sought to retain a formal appearance as distinct as possible from the low caste
majoors who were often up country
peasants seeking seasonal jobs. Another factor is that the ruling class
necessarily tries to divide the proletariat through a whole series of
techniques, because it would prefer a buffer, rather than push all the sellers
of labour-power towards greater unity. To call a clerk baboo, or its equivalent, and so on, should be viewed as much in
such a context. We can cite the case of a low-level engineer who was sacked
from a small concern because his bosses saw him taking a cup of tea with
ordinary workers. As discussed in the main essay, from an early stage, there
was a tendency, not only in India but globally, to conceptualise the
white-collar employees as petty bourgeois or “new middle class” in character.
The left, even as it organised unions, sought to refurbish this notion of a
petty bourgeois/ non-proletarian workforce, perhaps at times tactically so that
the workforce would at least agree to be unionised (as a member of a University
Teachers' Union, the present writer can testify to the resistance even now to
calling it a trade union). Yet, the moderate leaders and the ruling class alike
cannot ‘protect’ this supposedly distinct identity, but are forced to accept
the reality. Here are a few examples from different white collar organizations.
1.The Medical
Sales Representatives often refer themselves as field workers and behave as a
constituent of working class.
a) The main
heading in the organ of Federation of Medical & Sales Representatives
Association of India:
Fifty thousand
field workers expressed solidarity with IDC field workers.
b) FMRAI
observed May Day 1999, and its report was highlighted in its organ;
‘FMRAI, its
units and members observed this year’s May Day throughout the country. May Day,
International workers day became significant now in the background of
neocolonial attacks through globalisation’ . [FMRAI NEWS, July 1999]
c) Here is a
leaflet issued in 2000 (undated) jointly by CITU, AWBSRU, Association of
Chemical Workers etc. The leaflet, while highlighting various forms of
onslaught on the employees and workers of Sandoz by its management, urges the
readers to participate in the movement against the anti-working-class
activities of the multinational.
d) The Organisational Report of National
Federation of Sales Representatives’ Unions placed before the General Council
on 26th and 27th July, 2002 by the Secretary of the Federation was concluded
with the slogans : Long Live Unity of Sales Workers and Long Live Working Class
Unity.
E) The sales
representatives of Pharmaceutical companies have often been referred as workers
in the Bulletins of All West Bengal Sales Representative Union.
2. a) White discussing Labour law for
the New Millennium, the AIBEA explicitly demands:
‘There must be
universal coverage, doing away with the limitations on coverage under different
existing laws and cover all the establishments/undertakings irrespective of the
number they employ and the nature of the undertaking or the activities or the
salary/wage limits. Only those who exercise substantial powers of management
are to be left out. This is also in line with the fundamental human rights
converting of the ILO.’ (June 99, Bank
Flag, organ of AIBEA )
b) One of the
lead articles in Bank Flag to
commemorate May Day begins with the heading:
‘The Working
Class movement showing resurgence and facing new challenges’; and concludes
with the call:
‘Let this May
Day, 1998 be pledged to carry forward our Trade Union activity towards raising
the class consciousness of the working people, making them aware of their
political role as a class, defending class and national interest’ . [May ‘98 Bank Flag]
3. The Forum of Public Sector Workers
and Officers has been formed of which Bank employees are one of the important
constituents. On its behalf, a Charter of Workers was prepared and it was
submitted to all the political parties of the country. The charter begins with
the call:
‘To all
political Parties
Working class
has expectations from you’ (Feb ’98, Bank Flag)
4. a)The organ
of the Coordination Committee of the Associations of Central Government
Employees of West Bengal, The
Coordination in its May Day special
issue of 1998 highlights the historic call:
‘The working
class has nothing to loose but their chains.’ in its front page
b)The editorial
of the same issue begins with the following :
‘ The movement
has to be developed on the basis of working class ideology’.
c) In the lead
article of the May Day issue of 1999 the government employees were repeatedly
referred to as a part of the working class.
d) In a number
of articles in The Co-ordination, the
struggle against capitalism and fight for socialism have been declared as the
historical mission of the government employees. If they are some different
class, especially madhyabitto (
‘middle-income class’), how do the authors, or the leaders of the employees'
movement, explain the fact that their historical mission coincides with that of
the working class!
[Refer, articles
in Jan-98, Nov-99 )
Sukomal Sen, a
leading figure in the govt employees movement even tried to prove the case
theoretically.
In the March 1998 issue, he wrote an
article with the title: ‘Communist Manifesto and the unquestioned relevance of
proletarian revolution’. While discussing the effect of the development of
capitalist research and inventions on the structure of the working class, he
directs the attentions of the readers towards ‘the re-union of the intellectual
and productive activities and the entry of intellectual labour into the
production process’, and eventual ‘drastic change of the structure of the
working class due to the relative increase of the service sector and skilled
intellectual workers with respect to the industrial workers’. Then he showed
theoretically why and how these intellectual elements in the production process
should he treated as the working class. Ironically, Sen's party, now in power
in West Bengal, has given a different kind of proof. The West Bengal Government
has issued a Government Order, imposing a forty-hour work-week on College and
University teachers. This has been analysed by the present author elsewhere.
5. In the second
issue (26.7.2001) of Srambarta, the
organ of the Bluestar Workers’ (Cal) Union, the Union while making an appeal to
fight against the drive for V.R.S never forgets to refer to both the white
collar and blue-collar employees as member of the working class.
The examples may be increased manifold. There
may be some more interesting observations and comments. But, the above examples
are sufficient to prove that though the members and leadership and
rank-and-file of the white collar employees or intellectual labourers, often
like to pose as a collective group possessing a separate identity other than
the working class, and sometimes even refer themselves as a different class,
‘middle class’ or ‘Madhyabitto’,
whenever they face an onslaught either by the management or government-- they
are forced to relate their existence and their struggles with the broader
sections of the working class and recognise their real class-identity. Not only
that, whenever they try to locate their position historically, they do not find
any separate historical existence or mission; they have to relate themselves
with the great historical events of the working class like May Day, November
Revolution etc.
Appendix- II
Questionnaire
Please fill up the following form:-
Instruction
Please mark afor positive reply andr for negative.
If there is more than one answer that you
may feel is correct in * marked question, then put number according to your
preference (1,2,3…). For any clarification you may contact by phone: 465-2507;
or email: sengautam@hotmail.com, or
contact the person who has given you this form.
- Identity:
Gender: Male 1 Female1 Profession…………………………. Age………
Salary/wage (per month) Rs……………….
City/town/village & State………………….
Monthly income (if any) of spouse Rs………………
No. of dependents in the family:
No. of students in the family:
Educational Qualification of the
respondent: Madhyamik1 H.S.1 Graduate1 Post
Graduate1 Other……….1
Name of workplace:
Post……………………………. Working1 Retired1
Type of household items owned: B/W TV1 Colour TV1 Cycle1 Phone1 Computer1 Washing Machine1 Fridge1 Motorbike1 Scooter1 Car1 Other………1
Type of residence: Tenant1 Ownership1 Quarter1 Other…….1
Amount of area where the residents
reside:……………..sq.ft/sq.metre.
- In which class do you place yourself?*
Middle-income1 Employee1 Worker1 Other1
[You may prefer more than one]
- a. If you include yourself in a class other than the working
class then why?*
Not directly
participating in production❒ Way of
living❒ Presence of
consumer goods lime TV etc.❒ Higher
income❒ Higher
cultural standard❒ Educational
qualification❒ Being close
to the authority❒ For doing
less physical labour❒ For
receiving special esteem from the society❒ Other……………………❒
b. If there are
workers in your work place, how do you differentiate with them?
Earning more
income❒ Having
different culture❒ Receiving
sympathetic behaviour from the authorities❒ Superior position in the hierarchy❒ Getting special advantage❒ Have to do less laborious work❒
c. If there are
workers in your workplace, then do you belong to the same union/association?
Yes❒ No❒
d. In your
enterprise
Do the officers
and the employees use the same canteen? Yes ❒ No ❒ Not relevant
❒
Do the employees and the
workers use the same canteen? Yes ❒ No ❒ Not relevant ❒
Do the officers and the
employees use the same lavatory?Yes ❒ No ❒ Not relevant ❒
Do the employees and the
workers use the same lavatory?Yes ❒ No ❒ Not relevant ❒
4. What is your attitude
towards your relation with owner/management?*
Feel that the owner/management and yourself
belong to the same family❑
Enjoy the same right with respect to them in
cases of major decision making❑
Feel fraternal andamicable relationship with
them ❑
The relationship
is such that they give orders and you have to obey those for your livelihood ❒
Others……………………………..❒
- If you include yourself within the ranks of the working class,
then why?*
Being deprived from decision making ❒ feeling alienation from the whole working process ❒ always have to obey orders of the boss ❒ if retrenched, there will be no other way of earning
livelihood ❒
6. Are you member of any
Trade Union/ Association? Yes ❒ No ❒
- If you are a
member, then why?*
The organisation pressurises
❒ There is a
compulsion to remain in this or that organisation ❒ To get personal benefit ❒ To develop collective fight for getting protection against
the onslaught of owner/ management and to maintain standard of livelihood ❒
- If you are
not a member, then why?*
The organisation does not
protect the interest of rank and file workforce ❒ There is a lack of democracy in each and
every organisation ❒
The leadership is opportunistic ❒ No personal
interest will be served ❒ The trade union movement is
harmful ❒
7. How can you protect
yourself from the onslaught of owner/management in the best way?
Through individual
bargaining ❒ Through lobbying ❒ Joining collective struggle ❒ Other ……………… ❒
8. Do you feel deprivation
or/and uncertainty in your life? Yes ❒ No ❒
If yes,
- Whom/what do
you make responsible for that?*
Own fate ❒ Owner/ management ❒ Callous government ❒ Because a few own
or control all the means of production ❒ Inequality in distribution of resources and
wealth ❒ Capitalist system ❒
- How do your
react?
Feel helpless ❒ get angry ❒ intend to protest ❒ feel that united resistance would be more
effective ❒ desire to change the society ❒ desire to change the government ❒ Other………..❒
9. Have you ever
participated in a strike/s? Yes ❒ No ❒
10. How do you evaluate the
strike movement?*
Should not be called ❒ A natural weapon
for self-defence and bargaining ❒ A last resort ❒
11. Do you observe May
Day? Yes ❒ No ❒
If yes, do you raise the
slogan: “Workers of all countries unite?
Yes ❒ No ❒
If yes, do you feel
uneasy? Yes ❒ No ❒ Do you feel natural? Yes ❒ No ❒
Analysis of the Survey
A survey had
been planned to facilitate our research work. The questionnaire has been given
above. However, it was soon recognized that this would not be an adequate
sample survey. So the results are presented as simply pointers to further
research.
Mode of
survey
Initially, the
researcher prepared questionnaire which would help white collar employees to
self-evaluate their class behaviour and position themselves. The researcher
then selected a group of persons attached to white collar unions or mixed
unions and explained the content. The selected persons passed the questionnaire
to different individuals in different sectors.
The respondents include a wide variety of professions: clerks, nurses,
teachers, chemists, draughtsmen, officers and
others. The establishments covered were also of various nature : steel,
coal, college, school, banking, media, post and telecom and other.
The total number of respondents was
106.
The number of white-collar respondents was 102.
The number of blue-collar respondents was 4. These blue-collar
employees were inadvertently included in the evaluation process.
Observation
Out of 102 white-collar respondents, 58 opted to declare themselves as
members of working class ( category A), while 44 placed themselves as
non-workers ( category B).
1.So far the consumer pattern is concerned the majority of both the
categories possess CTV, Fridge, Phone: a few in both the categories possess two
wheelers and computers.
2. Within category A, the salary/wages range from Rs. 1,500 to Rs.
20,000 a month. Their educational qualifications vary from Madhyamik to
Post-Graduate. The variation of wage/salary in category B is from Rs. 4,000 to
Rs. 20,000 pm: the average earning in
category B is slightly higher than category A. The educational qualification in
category B is more or less similar to category A. The tenant/ house or flat
ownership pattern is evenly distributed between the categories.
3. Though the respondents of category B highlight one or a combination
of the following points:
i)Not directly participation in
production, ii) style/manner of living, iii) Educational
qualification, iv) doing less physical
labour
to designate themselves as middle class and/or employees and though a good
number of respondents in category B feel that they have amicable relationship
with the management and enjoy some right
in decision making process, yet
a)
Almost all of them declare that they have to obey
unquestioningly the orders of their bosses;
b)
A majority of them are members of some Trade Union
or Association; and almost all of them joined Trade Union to fight their cause
collectively;
c)
All 44 respondents feel deprivation and uncertainty
in their lives and blame either management or government or unequal
distribution or capitalist system or their different combination for the same.
d)
All 44 respondents participated in strike movement
and out of them 20 consider strike as a natural weapon and 32 as a last weapon.
e)
42 respondents observe May Day and out of them 32
feel no unease in raising the slogan “Workers of all countries unite”. Only two
are not in the habit of observing May Day.
4. The 4 blue-collar employees
did not express any specific differentiation while expressing their consumer
pattern or relation with management/owner. Their attitude towards trade union
movement, strike or May Day observation also do not show anything marked
contrast with respect to the Categories A or B.
Inference
The dominant tendency of the observations of the respondents
corroborate our theoretical position i.e the white collar employees, though not
always conscious of their class position, belong to the working class.
Admittedly, this is a brief survey. It has neither a big enough data base nor
has any attempt been made to draw out elaborate statistical conclusions
(chiefly because the narrowness of the data base suggested the futility of such
an exercise). However, this survey indicates lines along which a bigger project
could be undertaken. Two areas where special care should be taken in case of a
bigger survey are the following: first, the positions of women when we are
considering married women with husbands holding a different category of jobs,
as well as unmarried women living with parents where the father holds a
different category of job; and second, the differences, if any, between those
employees who work in exclusively white collar sectors, and those who work in
mixed enterprises (for e.g., white collar employees in factories, where
differences between white-collar and blue-collar might be clearly evident).
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