3. Alienation, exploitation and class struggle
The concepts in the title of this chapter are often treated as part of Marx’s sociological or economic thought rather than his philosophy, but in reality Marxism is an integrated whole. I think they are so central to that whole that a brief treatment of them is necessary before moving on to discuss his more abstract philosophical theories such as materialism and dialectics.
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” wrote the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. As the great radical poet William Blake noted in the London of the 1790s:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
(William Blake, “London”, 1794)
Observing similar symptoms philosophers of the time such as Hegel and Kierkegaard used the term “alienation” to describe the human condition. It meant that people were somehow “spiritually lost”, were “estranged from their true selves” and suffered from “a loss of meaning in life”. “Alienation” is still often used in this way today.
Marx, who saw the same symptoms, also used the term “alienation”, especially in his early work The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. However, he produced an analysis of alienation that was both more precise and more down to earth, rooted in the material realities of people’s actual lives, without losing any of its profundity and universal applicability.
For Marx alienation was rooted in people’s relationship to the products of their labour and to their labour itself.
That workers are alienated from the products of their labour, ie are separated from them, and do not control them in any way, is a simple, obvious and observable fact – so obvious, so taken for granted, that it is normally not even commented on. It is just assumed, as if it were a law of nature, that when workers at Ford or Hyundai make cars, the cars belong to the company not to the workers; that when they dig coal or weave cloth the coal or the cloth belong to the owners of the mine or the mill. Marx, however, noticed it, questioned it, sought its origin and analysed its consequences. He saw that, “This fact simply implies that the object produced by labour, its product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer” (K Marx, Early Writings, London, 1963, p122).
Working people are dominated by the products of their own labour, and “the more the worker expends himself in work the more powerful becomes the world of objects which he creates in face of himself, the poorer he becomes in his newer life, and the less he belongs to himself” (as above, p122).
As a result:
Labour certainly produces marvels for the rich but it produces privation for the worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity for the worker. (as above, p124)
In 2012 we can add that alienated labour has produced nuclear weapons capable of wiping out the human race and the likelihood of catastrophic climate change through the industrial generation of carbon emissions.
Marx then takes the analysis of alienation a stage further. He says that if workers are alienated from the products of their labour this can only be because they are alienated “in the process of production, within productive activity itself”.
The product is indeed only the résumé of the activity of production. Consequently, if the product of labour is alienation, production itself must be active alienation. The alienation of the object of labour merely summarises the alienation in the work activity itself. (as above, p124)
There has been a persistent tendency, especially among academic sociologists, to reduce what Marx is saying here to the observation that in industrial capitalism many workers’ jobs are dirty, monotonous, boring, exhausting, dangerous, etc, or even further to the fact that many workers resent doing such boring, monotonous work – ie to reduce the concept of alienated labour to the physical conditions of work or a subjective feeling on the worker’s part. This then leads to the view that alienation can be countered, or at least substantially alleviated, by making the work a bit more varied or interesting, or even with a new coat of paint on the factory walls or pumping out music over the tannoy. But Marx means much more than this. For Marx what is decisive is the social relationship of the worker to his or her work. It is the fact that the worker sells his or her ability to work to someone else (the employer/capitalist) and in doing so loses control over the purposes and methods of the work. The work is for someone else, not for him or herself, individually or collectively.
What constitutes the alienation of labour? First, that the work is external to the worker, that it is not profit of his nature… His work is not voluntary but imposed, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need, but only a means for satisfying other needs… The external character of work for the worker is shown by the fact that it is not his own work but work for someone else, that at work he does not belong to himself but to another person. (as above, pp124-125)
Wage labour, therefore, is alienated labour and the latter can be abolished only by abolishing wage labour, ie abolishing capitalism.
The fact that Marx locates the origin of alienation in the worker’s relationship to work does not, however, make this a narrow economic concept, applicable only to the workplace. On the contrary, for Marx labour is fundamental to every aspect of human existence. In the first place Marx argues it was through labour that humans separated themselves from animals and became human. In the second place it is through labour that people shape their environment and themselves. Labour is the basis of history and society.
Man can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life… This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, as they are. What they are, therefore coincides with their production, both with what they produce and how they produce. (K Marx and F Engels, The German Ideology, in D McLellan, ed, as above, pp160-161)
Because labour plays this fundamental role, the alienation of labour distorts the totality of human social relations. Marx analyses the consequences:
Since alienated labour: (1) alienates nature from men, and (2) alienates man from himself, from his own active function, his life activity, so it alienates him from the species… (3)… It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life. (4) A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the product of his labour, from his life activity and from his species-life, is that man is alienated from other men. (K Marx, Early Writings, as above, pp127, 129.)
Examples of these different alienations abound in the contemporary world. Our alienation from nature is seen not only in climate change but also in the multitude of other ways in which capitalist industry pollutes and damages the environment (see, for example, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, New York, 2010). Our alienation from our bodies appears graphically in the phenomena of chronic obesity and anorexia, and the distorted, commodified forms of sexuality with which we are constantly bombarded in the media. Our alienation from other human beings is seen in widespread racism, xenophobia and scapegoating, promoted by our rulers but also accepted and internalised by sections of the working class.
Marx also relates alienation to the question of class. “If the product of labour does not belong to the worker…this can only be because it belongs to a man other than the worker” (K Marx, Early Writings, as above, p130). This “other man” is the capitalist “who does not work and is outside the work process” (as above, p131).
The capitalist and the worker, Marx argues, are two sides of the same coin of alienation, but there is a crucial difference:
The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation. But the former class finds in this self-alienation its confirmation and its good, its own power: it has in it a semblance of human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence… Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian the destructive side. (K Marx, The Holy Family, in D McLellan, ed, as above, p134)
Alienated labour therefore produces an alienated society, an alienated world; a world out of control, a world of extremes of wealth and poverty, a world in which human beings are threatened by the products and consequences of their own work, estranged from each other as individuals and divided against each other by class and nation, by racism, sexism and religious hatred. A world in which everything from bread and water to sex, art, health and education are turned into commodities which thousands of millions cannot afford to buy.
In a word it produces our world today – a world that has to be changed if the human race is to survive and live free human lives.
Some commentators on Marx (most notably the French philosopher Louis Althusser, who I discuss in chapter 12) have claimed that the idea of alienation is present only in Marx’s early writings and that he rapidly abandoned it in favour of the concept of exploitation. This is false. The theme of alienation and alienated labour appears throughout Marx’s writing including his most important mature work, Capital. However, it is the case that Marx had to develop his theory of exploitation alongside the theory of alienation. This was because although alienation provided a profound general diagnosis of the ills of capitalism, a more precise quantifiable concept was needed to analyse the working of the capitalist economy, and the nature and dynamic of the class struggle.
In everyday language (which is heavily influenced by the ruling class) exploitation is a vague moral term used to condemn what is regarded as exceptionally bad behaviour by rogue bosses, for example, employers who pay wages below the socially accepted minimum. For Marx, however, exploitation has a precise scientific meaning – the systematic extraction of wealth by one group or class from the labour of another group or class – and exploitation is not the exception but the rule, inherent in the system, of every form of class society in history.
In pre-capitalist forms of class society – ancient slavery, feudalism, the state despotisms of India, China, etc – the exploitation of the slaves, serfs and peasants was fairly open and usually implemented by direct physical force. For example, the European serf of the Middle Ages was obliged either to work unpaid on the lord’s land for, say, two days a week, or to give the lord, again unpaid, a portion of his produce. If the serf failed to comply, the lord’s soldiers rapidly made an appearance.
But in capitalist society it appears on the surface – and certainly this is the view taken by the capitalists – that such exploitation has ceased. What they say is that the employer/employee relationship is a fair exchange, work for wages, freely entered into by both parties. Indeed they even expect the workers and society at large to be grateful to them for “creating jobs” and “providing work”. And to the workers who have the temerity to complain or ask for more, they say, “No one is forcing you to work here, go and get a job elsewhere.”
Marxism rejects this view completely. Capitalists do not create jobs or work. There was work before capitalism and there will be work after capitalism. Jobs are tasks that require performing, and arise from human needs. In the world today there are 7 billion people who need feeding, clothing, housing, educating, healing when they are sick, entertaining, transporting, etc. There is thus an abundance of work for these same 7 billion people to do. What capitalists actually do, through their ownership and control of the means of production, is make it impossible for the majority of human beings to work except by working for them. Nor, of course, do they employ people as a charitable exercise but in order to make profit, ie to expand the value of their capital, and the workers enter into the wage contract not “freely” but because it is the only way they can earn a living.
Most importantly Marx demonstrated that within the wage-labour relationship there lay concealed unpaid labour just as real as the unpaid labour of the serf. The starting point of this demonstration is Marx’s understanding that under capitalism workers’ labour power (their ability to work) is sold as a commodity like every other commodity. The value of a commodity (value is not the same as price, but is the underlying point around which prices oscillate) is determined, Marx says, by the amount of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. The reason a loaf of bread sells for £1 while a shirt sells for £20 and a car for £10,000 is, in the final analysis, that it takes 10,000 times as many hours of labour to make a car, and 20 times as many to make a shirt, as it does to make a loaf of bread.*
Apply this to labour power and it follows that the value of labour power, ie the wage it is paid, is determined by the amount of labour time socially necessary to produce it, ie feed, clothe, train the worker so that s/he is able to work.
However, in one vital respect human labour power differs from all other commodities: it is attached to a living person and is creative. Human labour power can produce more value than it costs to reproduce the labour power itself. This difference, this “surplus value” as Marx called it, is pocketed by the capitalist and is the source of the capitalist’s profit. What it means is that the worker who works, say, eight hours a day, 40 hours a week and is paid say £80 a day, £400 a week, produces the goods or services equal to their wages in say, five hours of the day or 25 hours of the week and in reality works three hours a day, 15 hours a week, unpaid.
If this were not the case, if capitalists did not extract surplus value and make a profit out of workers’ labour, they would have no reason to employ them. And when they cease to make a profit out of the labour of the workers they employ, they promptly “let them go”, ie sack them.
Marx’s theory of surplus value is of enormous significance. It exposes the ideological, self-serving nature of the capitalist view of wage labour, but it does much more than this. It enables the rate of exploitation/surplus value to be calculated and expressed mathematically and the same for the rate of profit – surplus value as a proportion of the capitalist’s total outlay on wages, raw materials and fixed capital. In Marx’s formula: R=S/(C+V) (where R = rate of profit, S = surplus value, C = constant capital, ie machines, buildings, raw materials, etc, and V = variable capital, ie wages).
The rate of profit is the fundamental factor determining the level of capitalist investment, the level of employment and the rate of growth or contraction, ie the general health or sickness, of the capitalist economy. The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to decline outlined by Marx in Capital, Volume 3, is the principal contradiction underlying capitalism’s tendency to economic crisis (this is explained in chapter 6 below). The theory of surplus value is thus the cornerstone of Marx’s whole critical analysis of capitalist production.
However, the theory of surplus value does something else as well: it shows that at the heart of capitalist production, and therefore of capitalist society, lies a direct and irreconcilable conflict of interest. The longer the working day the greater the proportion of unpaid labour and of surplus value there will be for the capitalist; the shorter the working day the lower the proportion of unpaid labour; the lower the level of wages the higher the level of profit; the higher the wages the lower the profits. Profits and wages, Marx says:
stand in inverse ratio to each other. Capital’s exchange value, profit, rises in the same proportion as labour’s share, wages, falls and vice versa. Profit rises to the extent that wages fall; it falls to the extent that wages rise… The interests of capital and the interests of wage labour are diametrically opposed. (K Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, in D McLellan, ed, as above, pp261-62.)
Thus Marx’s theory of exploitation, his theory of surplus value, leads directly to the theory of class and class struggle.
There is probably no concept more closely associated with Marx and Marxism than class, but there is also no concept so widely misunderstood. Confusion about class reigns at every level: in the media, in everyday life and in the academic world.
One of the most common confusions is the notion that class is primarily a matter of people’s social origins, of their position at birth, and of inherited privilege or disadvantage. This is basically a hangover from the bourgeoisie’s struggle against feudalism, when the bourgeoisie championed “equality” (of legal rights and opportunity) against the inherited privileges and power of the feudal aristocracy. It is this view that leads to the utterly mistaken idea that class is disappearing or becoming less important in modern society (or that America, because it was never feudal and had no aristocracy, is somehow a classless society). Of course it is true that inherited privilege and wealth still play an important role in modern capitalism (just look at the role of Old Etonians in the British ruling class) but it is not the heart of the matter either for Marxist theory or in actual social practice. It is current social position not social origin that is crucial. The child of working class parents who becomes a manager or boss, behaves as a manager or boss not as a worker. The young black kid who grows up to become president of the United States behaves as the political representative of US imperialism not the representative of black people.
Another widespread confusion is that class is primarily about income and/or lifestyle. Obviously class plays a major role in determining income and lifestyle, but neither income nor lifestyle determines class. Inequalities of wealth and lifestyle, however wide they may be, nevertheless form a continuum from top to bottom and therefore cannot yield a coherent analysis of the class structure. On the basis of income or lifestyle one could conclude that there are five, ten or 15 classes, or none, and either way it is arbitrary. Moreover, individuals might have the same income and be members of different classes, eg a skilled manual worker and the owner of a small corner shop, or be members of the same class and live very different lifestyles.
In sociology, the academic discipline that deals with class, class is usually defined in terms of different life chances (opportunities for obtaining goods and services, for educational achievement, for getting a good job, for living a healthy and long life, etc) and the Marxist theory of class is dealt with roughly as follows:
For Marx, they say, class is defined by “relationship to the means of production”, leading to a two-class model of society consisting of a property-owning capitalist class or bourgeoisie, and propertyless working class or proletariat. There was some truth in this, but it is too simple; for the analysis of modern society a more complex model is required and this is provided by Max Weber and his latter-day disciples. For Weber class is not just a matter of property ownership or lack of it but of position in the labour market. Between the capitalists and the (manual) workers there is a middle class based on the mental skills and educational qualifications that they bring to the job market. As capitalism becomes technologically more sophisticated this class grows while the working class shrinks. Class polarisation fails to materialise. Moreover there are many other divisions in society based on “status” – contemporary Weberians would cite particularly gender and ethnicity – which cut across class and are often more important than class in determining people’s identity, and which Marx and Marxists have neglected.
This is a false account of Marx’s theory of class in many respects. Marx didn’t have a simple two-class model and was well aware of the existence of intermediate layers, the so-called middle class, and paid a good deal more attention to gender and race issues than Weber ever did – but this is not the key point. The key point is that at the heart of the Marxist theory of class are not unequal life chances (important as they are) but exploitation, the extraction of surplus value discussed in the last section. It is the daily fact of exploitation, the conflict of interest inherent in capitalist social relations, that produces the capitalists and workers as antagonistic classes.
The capitalists are those whose survival (as capitalists) depends on profit, which derives from the surplus value obtained from wage labour. The workers are those whose survival depends on the wages they receive for the sale of their labour power to the capitalist. This relationship locks the former and the latter into perpetual combat. Whether the capitalist inherited or built up his or her capital, went to public school or was born on a council estate, and whether the worker earns high wages or low, works in an office or school or a factory, or expends principally mental or physical energy, this does not change the essential conflict of interest.
The conflict of interest which has its source at the point of production extends, like the alienation which it parallels, throughout the society based on this production. It becomes a conflict of interest, a class conflict, in every issue of state and public policy from taxation to health services to crime and punishment, to foreign policy, arms spending, war and the preservation of the environment.
Neither Weber nor his sociological heirs, nor the journalists, nor the media commentators, grasp this at all and consequently their criticism of Marx misses its mark completely.
The middle classes, of which they make so much, certainly exist but their position is determined neither by their status nor by their lifestyle (both of which are consequences not causes of class position), but by their role in the processes of exploitation and class conflict.
Between the bourgeoisie (the capitalist class) and the proletariat (the working class) there are two quite large social groups. The first is the owners of small businesses, the petty bourgeoisie, whose typical representative is the small shopkeeper. This layer is oppressed by big business and even to some extent exploited (via finance capital and the banks) but it is also, and crucially, an exploiter of wage labour on a small scale. The second group consists of managers who are paid employees but whose function is to oversee the extraction of surplus value from the workers. For example, the manager of a supermarket is paid a wage but that wage is not for stacking shelves or serving customers, but for ensuring that the workers do this “efficiently” – ie in such a way that the employer makes as much profit as possible – and that wage is generally considerably higher than the wages of the workers so as to ensure the manager’s loyalty.
This “middle class” is not really a distinct class; rather it is a hierarchy of intermediate strata whose social role combines (in different proportions at different levels) elements of the capitalist and elements of the proletarian condition. At its upper end the middle class merges into the ruling class (senior corporation managers, senior civil servants and police chiefs are examples) and at its lower end (the self-employed plumber or painter and decorator or lower line manager) it merges into the proletariat. In the struggle between the capitalist class and the working class the middle class vacillates according to the strength of the gravitational pull of the two fundamental classes.
The different understandings of class in the Marxist and the Weberian or “common sense” perspectives lead to dramatically different pictures of the class structure in modern capitalism. Marx was emphatic that, “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, ie capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class developed” and that “the proletarian movement is…the movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority” (K Marx and F Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in D McLellan, ed, as above, pp226, 230).
By contrast in the Weberian/common sense view the development of capitalism leads to a decline of the proletariat as a proportion of the population. The issue cannot be resolved simply by counting heads because it is really a dispute about which heads to count. For the Weberians the proletariat consists only of “industrial” or “manual” workers (these terms are in themselves problematic – doesn’t a programmer work with his or her hands, doesn’t an electrician use his or her brain?) who are indeed shrinking in numbers in the developed capitalist countries, while the “white collar” or “non-manual” employees, seen as middle class, expand.
From the Marxist standpoint, however, the majority of, though not all, white collar employees (teachers, social workers, civil servants, secretaries, shop workers, nurses, etc) live by the sale of their labour power and are exploited by capitalists. The exploitation of some white collar workers, such as teachers and health workers in the public sector, is less easy to see than that of workers who produce commodities in private industry, but what they are really doing is producing and reproducing the commodity of labour power for the capitalist system, and like other workers they are paid less than the value of what they produce. They are therefore part of the working class and, in practice, act as such. The PCS (civil servants’ union) and the NUT (National Union of Teachers) have been in the forefront of the recent struggles over pension rights in Britain, while teachers and tax collectors have played an important role in the ongoing Egyptian Revolution. Once this is grasped it is clear that the working class or proletariat continues to constitute the large majority of the population in the developed capitalist countries, approximately 70 percent or more, and is on its way to becoming the most numerous class in the world as a whole.
It is interesting to note that whereas for most of the bourgeois views of class the division between the working class and the middle class is seen as a division between occupations (eg miners and teachers) for Marxists the dividing line runs within occupations. Thus most teachers are workers but head teachers are managers, most social workers are workers but (in Britain) team managers and above are becoming middle class. In the civil service the lower ranks are working class, but the topmost ranks are more or less part of the ruling class. It is also interesting that, whereas most academic sociologists ignore or fail to consider these distinctions, workers, especially trade unionists, who actually do these jobs, are acutely aware of them.
However, for Marx the most important feature of his theory of class was his identification of the working class’s revolutionary role. There were three elements to this. First, the working class conflict of interest with the capitalist class (which I have already outlined); second, its power; third, its ability to create a classless society. The power of the working class derives from the fact that its labour is the main producer of wealth and profit in society, from the dependence of all systems of transport, energy production, communications and state operations on its labour, and from its concentration in large numbers in workplaces and cities. This power gives the working class the capacity to defeat the bourgeoisie and its state. Its capacity to create a classless society derives from the necessarily collective nature of its struggle (from the smallest local dispute to the widest general strike and insurrection), from the fact that it can only take possession of the means of production collectively, and from its potential, unlike any previous class in history, to be both the producing and ruling class in society at the same time, thus ending the very basis of class division.
The revolutionary role of the working class is the core doctrine of Marxism both politically and philosophically.* Politically it is central because Marxism is indeed about changing the world and if the working class does not have the capacity to become revolutionary capitalism cannot be overthrown and socialism cannot be achieved – unless, of course, socialism could be brought about by parliamentary reform or alternatively imposed by a coup or conspiracy from above, in which case Marxism would be fundamentally refuted and redundant. Philosophically it is central because the struggle of the working class is the material basis on which Marxism arose, and “the standpoint of the working class” is the vantage point from which he developed all his main theories including the labour theory of value and historical materialism. This idea is returned to and elaborated at various stages in this book.*
However, it is also probably the most criticised and rejected aspect of Marxism, not only by pro-capitalist sociologists, Weberians, liberals and social democrats but also by radical intellectuals, “academic” Marxists and so on. At various points between the 1950s and the 1980s the revolutionary role of the proletariat was rejected by left sociologists such as C Wright Mills, John Rex, Ralf Dahrendorf, Tom Bottomore and Anthony Giddens; the Frankfurt School philosophers such as T W Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas; the theorists of revolt in the Third World such as Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray; the American Marxist economists Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy; the French philosopher André Gorz (who, in 1980, wrote Farewell to the Proletariat, the classic text of this genre); the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, and many others. Indeed there were times when there seemed to be something close to intellectual consensus on this question. The main exceptions were those leftists influenced by Maoism who were quite a force in the 1960s and early 1970s (but whose commitment to “the proletariat” tended to be abstract and rhetorical rather than actual: at the heart of Maoism was the idea of a party or “leadership” acting on behalf of the proletariat) and the Trotskyists of various kinds who attempted to build working class revolutionary parties.
Nevertheless in this period major working class struggles continued to occur, such as the big industrial battles in Britain in the early 1970s and the Italian “hot autumn” of 1969, sometimes reaching pre-revolutionary proportions as in the French general strike in May 1968, Chile in 1972-73, the Portuguese Revolution of 1974, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and Poland in 1980-81 (for analysis of these events see C Barker, ed, Revolutionary Rehearsals, London, 1987).
The rise of the international anti-capitalist movement following the Seattle demonstration of 1999 has produced a new layer of radical theorists and philosophers some of whom have achieved a kind of “intellectual star status” and a wide readership for their work: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Naomi Klein, John Holloway, David Harvey, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou and Terry Eagleton are names that spring to mind. Most of these theorists (Eagleton is an exception) also reject the centrality of the working class. Most importantly Hardt and Negri, in their influential books Empire and Multitude, argue that “the multitude” has replaced the working class as the revolutionary subject for our times. This and related ideas have certainly had a resonance in the recent indignados and Occupy movements. I will discuss these issues, along with some other critiques of the concept of the working class, in an appendix at the end of this book.
Here two points need to be made. First, that the modern working class, defined as those who live only by the sale of their labour power, far from disappearing, has never been as numerous as it is today. In 2002 Chris Harman, in a careful analysis based on Dean Filmer’s 1995 report for the World Bank, Estimating the World at Work, concluded that “the worldwide total figure for the working class comes to between 1.5 and 2 billion” and commented, “Anyone who believes we have said ‘farewell’ to this class is not living in the real world” (C Harman, “The Workers of the World”, International Socialism 96 (autumn 2002), p6). Since then the size of the international working class has increased substantially, not least because of the massive economic growth in China and India. Minqi Li writes:
Nonagricultural employment, as a share of China’s total employment, increased from 31 percent in 1980 to 50 percent in 2000, and increased further to 60 percent in 2008. According to a report prepared by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2002, about 80 percent of the nonagricultural labour force consisted of proletarianised wage workers, such as industrial workers, service workers, clerical workers, and the unemployed. Since the overwhelming majority of nonagricultural workers are wage workers who have to sell their labour power to make a living, the rapid growth of nonagricultural employment suggests massive formations of the proletarianised working class in China. (http://monthlyreview.org/2011/06/01/the-rise-of-the-working-class-and-the-future-of-the-chinese-revolution)
Urbanisation is not the same as proletarianisation but it is closely connected and the fact that the proportion of the world’s population living in cities passed the 50 percent mark in 2010, as compared to 37 percent in 1970, can only mean a big growth in the working class. The only way this can be denied is if the working class is equated solely with the traditional industrial working class – a view I have already argued against.
Secondly, this working class, especially in the last two years, is showing strong signs of combativity in many countries. In the Tunisian Revolution of 2010-11 the working class and the main trade union federation played a leading role in the overthrow of the dictator, Ben Ali, and likewise it was the combination of massive street mobilisations (involving huge numbers of workers) and workers’ strikes that drove out Mubarak in Egypt. In Greece and Spain there have been multiple general strikes and major confrontations in the streets. In China there has been a considerable wave of strikes and working class protest, and even in Britain 2011 saw a mass trade union demonstration of over half a million in March, followed by a mass strike of more than 2 million on 30 November.
In other words, there are no grounds for abandoning Marx’s view that the working class is the principal agent of socialist change.
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* There are two key arguments which demonstrate the truth of this labour theory of value. The first is that there exist an infinite number of commodities, with an infinite variety of qualities (weight, size, shape, colour, smell, taste, durability, etc) serving an infinite variety of human purposes: one quality all commodities have in common and which alone can serve as a measure of their relative value, ie determine the proportions in which they exchange with either, is that they embody a definite amount of necessary labour time. The second is that this law of value is enforced by capitalist competition: if capitalist A consistently sells his products below their value (their cost of production) he will make a loss and will go out of business. If capitalist A consistently sells his products above their value, capitalist B (or C or D) will, sooner or later, be able to undercut him and he will again go out of business. In the long run, therefore, competition obliges rival capitalists to sell their commodities at prices which fluctuate around their value measured in labour time.
* “The chief thing in the doctrine of Marx is that it brings out the historic role of the proletariat as the builder of socialist society” – V I Lenin, Collected Works, Vol 18, Moscow, 1975, p582.
* The relationship between the social being of the proletariat and the development of Marxist theory is also explored in J Molyneux, What is the Real Marxist Tradition?, London, 1985.