The working class and liberation
Socialist Outlook1990sPhil HearseScanned print read by OCR, and not yet proofread: expect run-together words, dropped letters and, where a piece began partway down a page, a few lines of its neighbour. The printed page is the authority.
politics Socialists have always argued that the working class is the central force for socialist change. This is not for any moral reason, or because it is always the most oppressed group in society, but because of its numerical strength and its central role in the production process.
An inevitable debate has grown up around the precise relationship of working class struggle to that of groups in society - often in their majority of working class composition - who are specially oppressed and have begun to organise against their oppression. Further questions have been raised about the changing composition of the working class itself. It is vital that socialists get these questions right.
Goodbye to the working class?
The most notable features of the changing character of the working class in nearly all advanced capitalist countries are the decline of industrial-manual labour; the growing feminisation of the workforce; and the increased division of the workforce between a core of stable, permanently-employed workers and a growing 'periphery' of casualised, occasionally employed workers. None of this should lead us to say 'goodbye' to the working class.
The decline of manual labour, and the growing number of white collar, service and distribution workers is a product of the changing nature of capitalist production, a consequence of technological change. However, it is wrong from a theoretical and practical point of view to imagine that the change in the composition of the workforce has substantially reduced the number of workers.
On a global scale, of course, not only has the number of workers increased dramatically in the past twenty years, leading to huge new concentrations of the proletariat in countries like Brazil, Korea and China, but in the third world the number of industrial workers has increased dramatically too. The decline of industrial, manual labour is a feature of some of the advanced capitalist countries, not of the capitalist world as a whole.
White collar workers, in private industry like banks and insurance, in local government and education, are often worse paid than industrial manual workers. Their relationship to capital is still one where they have to sell their wage-labour and are exploited. And they are massively unionised. It is true that frequently they do not have the same militant traditions of long-established industrial groups like miners, engineers, car workers or dockers. But the primary reason for this is that such militant traditions have to be built up over time.
White collar workers are going through a process of establishing these traditions, which take decades of accumulated experience. But it remains true that in many countries, both because of accumulated traditions, and the repressive character of work discipline, industrial workers remain the core of the most militant sectors of the working class.
White collar workers often have boring, repetitive and meaningless jobs, and have no identification with their work or product. Service workers are generally highly oppressed in both pay levels and their work regime. In some sectors they are not well unionised - for example in fast food chains and retailing. But they are equally part of the working class.
The resurgence of militant trade union struggle in both Britain and other major capitalist countries in recent years shows there is no really exor ing incial coelory or associal kid polical attors as a However, the level of trade unionisation, and the objective basis for the unity of the working class is threatened by recent developments towards more part-time (often women) workers, and the growth of unemployment and casual labour, as well as privatisation and 'flexible' working practices. These developments are part of the capitalists' drive to restructure production and to make the workforce more 'flexible'.
Practices like performance-related pay and local pay bargaining deepen these dangers of division, and open the door to a de-unionisation of
sections of the workforce.
This poses a challenge to the trade unions. The fight for the unity of the working class can only be advanced by making special attempts to unionise new sectors of workers, to make special provision for the involvement of women and part-time workers in the unions, and to fight unemployment and casualisation. Overall, the advanced capitalist countries - despite the big decline in unionisation in countries like the United States and Spain - are marked by the fact that the working class has not numerically declined, nor have the mass working class unions and political parties disappeared.
Autonomy and liberation politics Since the 1960s the relationship between the labour movement, socialist organisations and movements for the liberation of the specially oppressed have been fraught with conflict and difficulty. How should militant socialists see the development of autonomous movements of the oppressed?
The best place to start is with the relationship of the oppressed - of women, black people, lesbians and gay men and people with disabilities - to capitalism. Women's oppression certainly predates capitalism, and it is a moot point whether it predates class society. Other forms of oppression are more directly linked to the history of capitalism: modern racism, for example, cannot be separated from the history of imperialism and African slavery.
But whatever the precise historical origins of these forms of oppression, one thing is clear: they have acquired their own dynamic, and are not automatically destroyed by the destruction of capitalism. The history of all the post-capitalist states since 1917 shows this clearly.
Thus while the destruction of capitalism is a necessary condition for the liberation of oppressed groups, it is not sufficient. The overthrow of racism, sexism and other forms of oppression requires the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of socialist democracy, but will not be guaranteed by it. To ensure that requires specific movements, specific struggles, led by the oppressed themselves.
It follows that the specially oppressed have the same interest in the destruction of capitalism that the rest of the working class have,
and this is the objective basis for an alliance of the working class with the oppressed - whether those oppressed people are part of the working class or not. It also follows that for the specially-oppressed to merely fight to overthrow capitalism on the expectation that socialism will 'automatically' liberate them flies in the face of historical experience. If the basis of the autonomous movements of the oppressed is to pursue the specific struggles and needs of those oppressed groups, three things follow. First, autonomous self-organisation of the oppressed is a democratic right, in the labour movement and in society at large. It is not 'divisive', but creates the basis for a mobilisation which will create unity at a higher level.
Second, the best way to mobilise and involve the oppressed in struggle against their oppression is to build self-governing movements, capable of identifying their own goals, their own strategy and tactics and their own methods of struggle. Third, while women's movements, black movements, lesbian and gay movements and movements of people with disabilities will be socially autonomous and self-governing, they cannot be isolated from the general political currents in society. A huge range of diverse political ideologies exists within these movements. It follows that socialists, while being the champions of the movements of the oppressed, will also, inevitably, fight for an anti-capitalist perspective within them. While liberation movements, at least in Britain, have tended to be aligned with the left, this does not mean that they have been consciously anti-capitalist or revolutionary. On the contrary, most of the currents within the labour movement, and many in society at large, spontaneously develop inside movements of the oppressed - reformist, liberal, populist - even Stalinist. Unless socialists intervene with their own political priorities, these movements can be co-opted in a reactionary direction.
There is nothing undermining to autonomy for socialists within these movements to fight for a strategic alliance with the labour movement, and an anti-capitalist perspective. That doesn't mean building a 'socialist womens movement or a 'socialist' black movement, but merely that the different political perspectives within them will inevitably be debated -not in the form not of the adoption of rival ideologies, but in the form of contending proposals for concrete political action.
The conception of liberation politics outlined here means trying to articulate in a common alliance global anti-capitalist objectives with the demands and movements of the oppressed. But achieving that, of course, is not just a question of the autonomous movements getting their anti-capitalist act together. It is a question of the labour movement demonstrating its practical commitment to the goals of liberation politics.
There are major structural obstacles to this objective. A commitment to the goals of liberation politics means not just campaigning around lesbian and gay, black or women's issues - like racist deportations, donor insemination, sexual harassment, abortion - which the labour movement and the left has taken up to some degree or other. It is also a question of giving oppressed groups the political space and the democratic right to articulate their own struggles and objectives through the labour movement and the left.
This objective is impossible without the right to autonomous organisation inside the labour movement and positive action to challenge the bureaucracy and spontaneous hierarchies - characteristic of capitalism but reproduced throughout the labour movement.
There is no set of timeless formulas and practices which sum up 'positive action'. In general it means special measures, over and above the normal workings of the labour movement and the left, to ensure not only the participation of the oppressed, by the right to contribute at all levels, including the right to leadership. and the move stable of the betessed the band robe among the ev and a contradictory one. It will be contradictory and fraught with difficulties because both the labour movement and the movements of the oppressed are traversed by contradictory and hostile ideologies, ones which often represent the pressure of the trade union and Labour bureaucracy, or - in the last analysis - different class pressures.
In other words, socialist support for and participation in liberation politics (including participation in the leadership of liberation movements) is not something that will be 'achieved' once and for all; it is a permanent practice and a permanent tension. On it depends our ability to construct the kind of alliances needed to defeat the capitalist order.