The Communist Manifesto of 1848 introduced a new theory of revolution. Against the conspiracies of the few and the experiments of the dreamers, an emerging proletariat was heralded with the potential to usher in a new world. The argument was not that these dispossessed labourers carried revolution in their genes; rather it pointed to their potential for organization, which was facilitated by modern means of communication as well as by the way capitalists collectivized labour. Even though their organization would be ‘disrupted time and again by competition amongst the workers themselves’, it indeed proved to be the case that ‘the ever expanding union of the workers’ would lead to ‘the organization of workers into a class, and consequently into a political party’.5
It was this sense of class formation as process that led E.P. Thompson to argue so powerfully that class was not a static social category but a changing social relationship, which historically took shape in the form of class struggle before class. Out of the struggles of the dispossessed labourers against the new capitalist order in England in the last half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth came the growing collective identity and community of the working class as a social force.6 Moreover, as Hobsbawm subsequently emphasized, it was really only in the years from 1870 to 1914 – as proletarianization reached a critical mass, and as workers’ organizational presence developed on a national and international scale through mass socialist parties and unions – that the revolutionary potential in the working class that Marx had identified looked set to be realized.7 However arcane the very term ‘workers’ state’ now may seem, it made sense to people in 1917 – and not least to nervous bourgeoisies.
Yet there was much that made this problematic even then. The fact that so many trade unions had emerged that had nothing to do with socialism reflected how far even the newly organized industrial proletariat stood from revolutionary ambitions. And where there was a commitment to socialist purposes, as was ostensibly the case with the social democratic parties of the Second International, this was compromised in serious ways. The winning of workers’ full franchise rights had the contradictory effect of integrating them into the nation state, while the growing separation of leaders from members inside workers’ organizations undermined not only accountability, but also the capacity to develop workers’ transformative potentials. This was of course contested in these organizations even before Roberto Michels’ famous book outlined their oligarchic tendencies.8 But these two factors – a class-inclusive nationalism and a non-transformative relationship between leaders and led in class organizations – combined to determine why the catastrophic outcome of inter-imperial rivalry announced with the guns of August 1914, far from bringing about the international proletarian revolution, rather ambushed European social democracy into joining the great patriotic war and making truce in the domestic class struggle.
What made proletarian revolution ushering in a workers’ state still credible after this – perhaps all the more credible – was the Russian Revolution. But what Rosa Luxemburg discerned within its first year would definitively mark the outcome: a revolutionary process which in breaking with liberal democracy quickly narrowed rather than broadened the scope of public participation, ending as a ‘clique affair’. Lenin, she noted, saw the capitalist state as ‘an instrument of oppression of the working class; the socialist state, of the bourgeoisie’, but this ‘misses the most essential thing: bourgeois class rule has no need of the political training and education of the entire mass of the people, at least not beyond certain narrow limits’. The great danger was that:
Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom then, a clique affair.9
Isaac Deutscher, looking back some three decades later, succinctly captured the dilemma which had led the Bolsheviks to bring about a dictatorship that would ‘at best represent the idea of the class, not the class itself’. He insisted that in consolidating the new regime the Bolsheviks had not ‘clung to power for its own sake’, but rather that this reflected a deeper quandary. Even though anarcho-syndicalists seemed ‘far more popular among the working class’, the fact that they ‘possessed no positive political programme, no serious organization, national or even local’ only reinforced the Bolsheviks identification of the new republic’s fate with their own, as ‘the only force capable of safeguarding the revolution’.
Lenin’s party refused to allow the famished and emotionally unhinged country to vote their party out of power and itself into a bloody chaos. For this strange sequel to their victory the Bolsheviks were mentally quite unprepared. They had always tacitly assumed that the majority of the working class, having backed them in the revolution, would go on to support them unswervingly until they had carried out the full programme of socialism. Naive as the assumption was, it sprang from the notion that socialism was the proletarian idea par excellence and that the proletariat, having once adhered to it, would not abandon it … It had never occurred to Marxists to reflect whether it was possible or admissible to try to establish socialism regardless of the will of the working class.10
The long term effects of what Luxemburg had so quickly understood would contribute to reproducing a dictatorial regime regardless of the will of the working class – and relatedly, also to the gaps in the ‘political training and education of the entire mass of the people’ – were chillingly captured by what a leader of the local trade union committee at the Volga Automobile Plant said to us in an interview in 1990 just before the regime established in 1917 collapsed: ‘Insofar as workers were backward and underdeveloped, this is because there has in fact been no real political education since 1924. The workers were made fools of by the party.’11 The words here need to be taken literally: the workers were not merely fooled, but made into fools; their revolutionary understanding and capacity was undermined.
The fillip that 1917 had given to fuelling workers’ revolutionary ambitions worldwide was more than offset by the failure of the revolution in Germany and the Stalinist response to an isolated and beleaguered Soviet Union after Lenin’s death, with all the adverse consequences this entailed. Though the spectre of Bolshevism hardly faded, it was the spectre of fascism that dominated radical change in the interwar years. Nevertheless, there was also widespread recognition of the potential of the working class as the social force most capable of transforming state and society. This perception was not least based on worker organization and class formation during the Great Depression in the USA, which was already by then the new world centre of capitalism. This contributed to the sense on the part of leading American capitalists and state officials as they entered the Second World War that among the barriers to the remaking of a liberal capitalist international order, ‘the uprising of [the] international proletariat … [was] the most significant fact of the last twenty years’.12
The strength of the organized working class as it had formed up to the 1950s was registered in the institutionalization of collective bargaining and welfare reforms. The effects of this were highly contradictory. The material gains in terms of individual and family consumption, which workers obtained directly or indirectly from collective bargaining for rising wages as well as from a social wage largely designed to secure and supplement that consumption, were purchased at the cost of union and party practices that attenuated working-class identity and community – especially in light of the restructuring of employment, residency and education that accompanied these developments. To be sure, the continuing salience of working-class organization was palpable. This was increasingly so in the public sector, but it was also measurable in class struggles in the private sector which resisted workplace restructuring, as well as in the wage-led inflation that contributed to the capitalist profitability crisis of the 1970s. Yet the failure to renew and extend working-class identity and community through these struggles opened the way to the neoliberal resolution of the crises of the 1970s through a widespread assault on trade unionism and the welfare state, and the interpellation of workers themselves as ‘taxpayers’.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, aided by the realization of a fully global capitalism and the networked structures of production, finance and consumption that constitute it, there were more workers on the face of the earth than ever before. New technologies certainly restricted job growth in certain sectors, but this was accompanied by entirely new sectors in both manufacturing and especially high tech services. Though this weakened the leverage of class struggles in important ways, it also introduced new points of strategic potential: strikes at component plants or interruptions of supplier chains at warehouses and ports could force shutdowns throughout a globally integrated production network, and whistleblowing could expose vast stores of information hidden by corporations and states.
The precarious conditions workers increasingly face today, even when they belong to unions, speaks not to a new class division between precariat and proletariat. Precariousness rather reflects how previous processes of working-class formation and organization have become undone. Precariousness is not something new in capitalism: employers have always tried to gain access to labour when they want, dispose of it as they want and, in between, use it with as few restrictions as possible. There is in this context limited value in drawing new sociological nets of who is or is not in the working class. Rather than categorizing workers into different strata – nurses or baristas, teachers or software developers, farmhands or truckers, salespeople or bank-tellers – what needs to preoccupy our imaginations and inform our strategic calculations is how to visualize and how to develop the potential of new forms of working-class organization and formation in the twenty-first century.
There are indeed multitudes of workers’ struggles taking place today in the face of an increasingly exploitative and chaotic capitalism. Yet there is no denying that prospects for working-class transformative agency seem dim. Factors internal to working-class institutions, their contradictions and weaknesses, allowed – in the developing as well as the developed countries – for the passage of free trade, the liberalization of finance, the persistence of austerity, the further commodification of labour power, the restructuring of all dimensions of economic and social life in today’s global capitalism. The inability of the working class to renew itself and discover new organizational forms in light of the dynamism of capital and capacities of the state to contain worker resistance has allowed the far right today to articulate and contextualize a set of common sentiments linked to the crisis – frustrations with insecurity and inequality and anger with parties that once claimed to represent workers’ interests. Escaping this crisis of the working class is not primarily a matter of better policies or better tactics. It is primarily an organizational challenge to facilitate new processes of class formation rooted in the multiple dimensions of workers’ lives that encompass so many identities and communities.