Social Class and Marxism

Defences and Challenges

Neville Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351899659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In recent years historians and other social scientists have widely questioned the continued relevance of social class - as historical relationship, as sociological category, as philosophical concept, and in terms of its enduring political significance. The success of the British Conservative Party since 1979, combined with the weaknesses and failures of the Labour movement, have led historians and social scientists to reconsider the general nature of connections between the 'social' and the 'political' and the specific relations between the working class and socialist and Labour politics. This collection of essays is a multi-disciplinary critique of the new revisionism, which demonstrates the continued vitality and promise of non-reductionist and non-determinist modes of class analysis.

PART ONE
Social Class

CHAPTER ONE
The ‘new structuralism’: Class politics and class analysis

Fiona Devine

Introduction

Predictions about the demise of class are nowhere more apparent than in the study of working-class politics. It has long been argued that class is a declining influence on the socio-political attitudes and behaviour of members of the working class and accounts for their weakening allegiance to the Labour Party. There have been different varieties of this thesis throughout the post-war period. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, proponents of the embourgeoisement thesis explained three successive electoral defeats for the Labour Party with reference to the growing affluence of the working class.¹ Affluence fuelled individual consumer aspirations which led members of the working class to vote for whichever political party met their individual material interests. In the 1970s and 1980s, the class dealignment thesis became the popular explanation for the Labour Party’s electoral misfortunes.² Increased social mobility, the growth of cross-class families, the decline in trade union membership and migration south had undermined working-class collectivism still further. Working-class voters considered their economic self-interests with reference to the political parties’ stand on issues. The declining significance of class, therefore, witnessed dwindling working-class support for the Labour Party.

However, other commentators have been critical of the view that issues are now the all-important factor shaping political alignments.³ Rather, class has been replaced by new structural cleavages – which divide voters into producers or consumers in the public or private sector of the economy – in shaping voting behaviour. More specifically, consumption cleavages have fragmented the working class as the more affluent private consumers of housing and transport see their interests as best represented by the Conservative Party, leaving only a dwindling minority of less affluent council tenants and state dependents supporting the Labour Party. These new cleavages, it is argued, have undermined working-class loyalty to the Labour Party and explain Labour’s routing at the polls on numerous occasions since the Second World War. The relative significance of class, therefore, has declined as the importance of new structural cleavages has increased.

The chapter focuses on the ‘new structuralism’ as espoused by political scientists and sociologists.⁴ Advocates of the sectoral cleavages thesis are not all of one mind and their contributions to the debate on class politics will be reviewed individually. The earliest exponents of the thesis in the late 1970s and early 1980s were Dunleavy, and Dunleavy and Husbands, whose arguments will be considered in some detail.⁵ As we shall see, some rather telling theoretical and empirical criticisms were levelled against the ‘new structuralism’ thesis in the mid to late 1980s.⁶ As a consequence, the thesis was widely dismissed as an explanation of declining working-class support for Labour in the 1980s. The early 1990s, however, has seen the publication of research on the impact of sectoral cleavages on party political allegiances and has resurrected the ‘new structuralism’ thesis as an account of Labour’s misfortunes throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. Attention will focus on the work of Edgell and Duke, and Saunders⁷ who have interestingly converged in charting the decline of class politics, despite their different starting-points on the left and right of the political spectrum.

It will be argued that many of the criticisms levelled against the early versions of the sectoral cleavages thesis apply with equal force to the later exponents of the thesis. The ‘new structuralism’ remains theoretically flawed since proponents of the thesis have failed to show that sectoral cleavages are the source of collective identities which generate a sense of shared interests which have, in turn, been mobilised by the political parties. At the empirical level, the evidence suggests that class remains the primary structuring influence on political alignments and that sectoral cleavages (especially the private and public consumption of housing), while not insignificant, come a distant second as they have done in the past. This is not to suggest that all politics can be reduced to class and that the study of sectoral cleavages should be completely neglected. After all, the consumption of housing in particular and consumption in general is an important component of people’s daily lives.⁸ Rather than examine either the effects of class location or sectoral location, there is room to examine the influence of both factors on voting behaviour and, more importantly, to examine how they might interrelate to shape political attitudes and behaviour.

Nevertheless, it will be emphasised that the ‘new structuralism’ does not explain why some members of the working class did not support the Labour Party in the 1980s. Indeed, it will be noted that the claims regarding the demise of class and the increasing significance of sectoral cleavages by supporters of the ‘new structuralism’ have been moderated over time. The crucial point is that while consumption may be important in people’s lives, it does not explain their political attitudes and behaviour at the national level at least. An alternative explanation of Labour’s four successive electoral failures since the late 1970s is needed. Following Marshall et al. and Heath et al.,⁹ it will be argued that political factors such as the voters’ evaluation of their party’s performance in government and opposition explain why the Labour Party continues to perform badly at the polls. This argument implies, of course, that Labour’s chances of electoral success are not entirely out of the question as a result of post-war social changes, but rather that contingent political factors currently militate against electoral success.

Finally, contrary to the views of Pahl,¹⁰ the persistence of class politics suggests that class analysis has a ‘promising future’. The evidence suggests that it is still important to consider ‘class-differentiated patterns of action’ in modern Britain.¹¹ The nature of working-class support for the Labour Party in the late twentieth century, and the extent to which it may or may not be changing, is still an important issue on the research agenda of class analysis. Of course, the relationship between people’s class situation and their political attitudes and behaviour is a complex one. Voters’ political alignments cannot be simply ‘read off’ from their structural location and all politics reduced to class. The relationship between social structure and party politics can only be understood with reference to both sociological and political factors in the analysis of electoral behaviour. This task remains to be fulfilled by political scientists and sociologists in the field of class analysis.

Sectoral consumption cleavages

The earliest exponent of the ‘new structuralism’ was Patrick Dunleavy, who set out his argument regarding the growing importance of sectoral cleavages in a number of position papers and in his subsequent monograph Urban Political Analysis.¹² Drawing on the work of Castells¹³ in the field of urban studies, Dunleavy¹⁴ argued that research into urban politics should embrace ‘the study of decision processes involved in areas of collective consumption’ such as health, education, housing and transport. That is, sectoral cleavages in the spheres of production and consumption are often the source of social and political conflict in both the national and local arenas.

Dunleavy noted that since the Second World War, the development of the welfare state has seen the huge expansion of urban public services. Local government expenditure on services increased threefold between 1955 and 1975 while nearly a fifth (19 per cent) of all employees were public-sector workers. Dunleavy, however, was interested in the social and political consequences of this change and, more specifically, the implications ‘in changing the structuration of electoral politics and the social basis of political alignments’.¹⁵ He argued:

The most important implication of the growth of the public services for the social structure has been the emergence of sectoral cleavages in consumption processes, by which we may understand social cleavages created by the existence of public and private (broadly speaking collective and individualised and often also service and commodity) modes of consumption. The relative importance of public (service) and private (commodity) forms of consumption seems to be the most important determinant of the salience of the social cleavage created by sectoral differentiation, and the extent to which it comes to serve as a focus of ideological structuration and party political alignments.

(Dunleavy, 1980a: p. 70)

He distinguished between two types of ‘consumption processes’; namely, those which are largely private, such as housing and transport, and those which are largely publicly provided, such as education and health. He argued that while the ownership of a home and a car is determined by income and occupational class, these consumption locations are not simply correlates of class since 50 per cent of home owners and 53 per cent of car owners are manual workers.¹⁶ They have an independent effect on voters’ political alignments and indeed, the private and public provision of housing and transport have become ‘a central basis of party political and electoral alignments’.¹⁷

Moreover, Dunleavy rejected socio-psychological explanations of how class or consumption locations influence political attitudes and behaviour since ‘there are no very significant local social pressures influencing a process of individual-level value formation’.¹⁸ Rather, he argued, ‘powerful (national) ideological structures are socially created and sustained by dominant classes groups or institutions and strongly influence individuals’ and groups’ perceptions of their interests vis-à-vis state policies and the interests of other social groups’.¹⁹ That is, ideological structures shape social interests which have become the source of increasing conflict between the political parties in the post-war period. From the late 1950s onwards, and especially in local politics, the Conservative Party has become increasingly associated with owner occupation in suburban areas, while the Labour Party has committed itself to public sector housing in urban areas. Dunleavy concluded that, ‘housing began to rival social grade as a predictor of political alignments’ as voters could be seen ‘as aligned intrinsically towards the party most clearly identified with the interests of their consumption location’.²⁰

Thus, the relative importance of consumption location on voting behaviour had grown at the expense of class. Conducting a log-linear analysis of odds ratios to control the effects of different variables as well as exploring the interactive effects between them, Dunleavy found that managerial workers (class B using market research social class categories) were 4.12 times more likely to vote Conservative than unskilled manual workers in 1974. However, home owners w...