Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (RLE Social Theory)

Bob Carter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138782242
• eBook ISBN: 9781317652168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Non-manual workers are fast becoming the largest occupational category in Western capitalist countries. This is the first book to present a detailed socialist analysis of this much discussed change in the class structure of contemporary capitalism.

Focusing on the class position of managerial and supervisory workers, Robert Carter takes as his starting-point the inadequacy of both orthodox Marxist and Weberian models of class relations. Rather, he concurs with recent structuralist theorists of class who maintain that there exists between capital and labour in the process of producing a new middle class. He parts company from the work of these theorists, however, in his insistence that the organisation and consciousness of the new middle class have also to be examined because of the practical consequences these have on class relations.

The book therefore examines the historical rise of the middle class, both in the private and the state sector, together with the tendency of the class to respond to its changing relations with capital and labour by unionising. It is sharply critical of the dominant models of the causes and nature of white-collar unionism – both industrial relations and Weberian ones – and indeed rejects these models in favour of a perspective which views the extent and nature of middle-class unionism within the dynamics of class relations.

1 Sociology, Marxism and the class structure of capitalist societies

It is now almost conventional wisdom within the discipline to view much sociological theorising as a debate with the ghost of Marx.¹ This view is particularly appropriate when theories of class are being examined, for no other writer has placed class so centrally in their world view as Marx, nor done so with greater effect on subsequent thought.² It needs to be stressed, however, that the ghost that many sociologists have tried to exorcise is frequently not an apparition that Marx himself would recognise. What is taken for Marxism is often merely a dismembered fragment of his writings. Such is the case with Marx’s approach to class and class structure. The impression is widely given that all that Marx had to say on the development of classes within capitalism was present in Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848. It is claimed that Marx saw only two classes in capitalist societies and that subsequent developments in such societies have proved him wrong.

This extremely crude approach, while perhaps sufficient for those wishing to refute Marx at a popular level, does not capture the complexities of Marx’s analysis of class. Furthermore, such approaches have continually been given credence by many sympathetic to Marxism, who have maintained the correctness of what were essentially polemical formulations and, perhaps more importantly, have published books on a wide range of aspects of Marxism without in any way regarding Marx’s theory of class as problematic.³ In these respects the gentle criticism offered by a leading member of the British Communist Party is worth noting:

The analysis of class structure is a key starting point for a Marxist analysis of any society. Yet all too often in our analysis we rely on the over-simplified view that society is to be divided solely between the working class on one side, and the capitalist class on the other.⁴

This version of Marxist class analysis I have termed orthodox Marxism, in spite of its simplistic interpretation of Marx. The consequence of this approach to class structure by Marxists is that until comparatively recently it was possible for both proponents and opponents of Marxism to talk of a Marxist class analysis with a degree of consensus about what was meant, if not about its validity.

Orthodox Marxism

The model of the class structure of capitalist societies embodied within orthodox Marxism either has been taken directly from, or at least coheres with, the picture of society sketched by Marx and Engels in Manifesto of the Communist Party. From this work it could be rightly concluded that they considered capitalism to be characterised by two classes only:

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. 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.⁵

These developments were explained by the constant need of the capitalists to expand their production and to revolutionise the means of production, causing increasing concentration of industry and the destruction of small-scale and independent production. As a consequence:

The lower strata of the middle class – the small trades-people, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants – all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.⁶

Such a bold and sweeping picture opens up this analysis to a formidable criticism in that it can be argued that the actual course of development of capitalist societies has not been along this path. Marx, it is claimed, failed to foresee the expanding middle class that came with capitalist development and which has greatly increased social stability. To quote one of his critics, A.J.P. Taylor:

It is not true that everyone but a few capitalists is being forced into the ranks of the proletariat. Quite the contrary. The proletariat has tended to remain a static element in society, or even to decline. Marx in his analysis never seems to acknowledge the middle men and administrators who make capitalism work. The more capitalism flourishes, the more there are of them. Advanced capitalism has brought with it an increasing middle class.⁷

Even more sympathetic critics have expressed unease with Marx’s account of the demise of the middle class. G.D.H. Cole, for instance, complained that:

Wherever Marxism won acceptance, the middle class ceased to be looked upon as a coherent and creative social group, and came to be thought of as merely a nuisance getting in the way of real historic conflict between the developed grande bourgeoisie and the proletariat.⁸

Anthony Giddens elaborated on this point, reducing Marx’s treatment of the middle classes to two alternatives:

Middle classes are either of a transitional type, or they are segments of the major classes. Thus the bourgeoisie are a ‘middle’ class in feudalism, prior to their ascent to power; while the petty bourgeoisie, the small property owners, whose interests are partly divergent from those of large scale capital, formed what Marx sometimes explicitly refers to as the ‘middle class’ in capitalism.⁹

Giddens claimed that the dichotomous model that Marx employed was therefore unable to ‘encompass that grouping, which has always escaped adequate analysis in Marxist terms, the new middle class’.¹⁰

These criticisms are somewhat harsh because the prognosis given for the lower strata of the middle class in Manifesto of the Communist Party has, if unevenly, been borne out. It is a less than adequate criticism, therefore, to claim that Marx’s analysis of this class fails to explain a development that is separate from, though related to, the demise of this group, namely the growth of a new middle class that is constituted within the capitalist production process. Furthermore, it is, in fact, not correct that Marx made no reference to the growth of this new middle class. He was far from unaware of these developments. Indeed, commenting on David Ricardo in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx stated:

What he forgets to emphasize is the constantly growing number of the middle class, those who stand between the workmen on the one hand and the capitalist and the landlord on the other. The middle classes maintain themselves to an ever increasing extent directly out of revenue, they are a burden weighing heavily on the working base and increase the social security of the upper ten thousand.¹¹

It is the case, however, that this awareness was not given any central importance by Marx and the passage itself remained unpublished during his lifetime. Moreover, the growth of the new middle class has subsequently not been considered by Marxists as altering the basic schema laid down by Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party. Georg Lukács, for example, an important and original Marxist theorist in other areas, was solidly orthodox on this aspect of Marxism. In 1920, he stated that:

Bourgeoisie and proletariat are the only broad classes in bourgeois society. They are the only classes whose existence and development are entirely dependent on the course taken by the modern evolution of production…. The outlook of other classes (petty bourgeois or peasants) is ambiguous or sterile because their existence is not based on their role in the capitalist system of production but is indissolubly linked with the vestiges of feudal society.¹²

Marxists, both inside and outside the Communist Parties, have continued to show a relatively common response to the rise of the salaried middle class that has grown with the expansion of capitalism. Whatever the term used by sociologists to describe this class, whether it be white-collar workers, non-manual workers, or the salariat, orthodox Marxists maintain that white-collar workers are either already objectively proletarian or are in the process of so becoming. This approach concentrates upon the relations of these groups to the means of production. It is argued that because they do not own the means of production they therefore need to sell their labour-power, and this is considered a sufficient criterion for their inclusion in the proletariat. It matters not whether they are workers by hand or brain, or whether they consider themselves to be so: they are proletarians.

There have been periodic attempts to argue from a more theoretical position that wage-labour, whatever its form, is the defining feature of the working class. Robert Schaeffer and James Weinstein, for instance, have argued that:

Marx’s method of class analysis begins by abstracting people’s common relation to capital (taken as a whole) and then demonstrates that the relation between capital and labor is based on abstract labor…. This relation is premised on the reduction of labor to a position of dependence on capital, which alone could provide it with a means of surviving.

This relationship is not based on what Marx called concrete heterogeneous labor (labor in all its complex and variegated forms) – labor with different skills performing different tasks within the capitalist division of labor. Marx insisted on the former, abstract labor, being the necessary tool of class analysis because capital continually puts living labor to different uses. And these uses change over time.¹³

The implication of the approach is that all those waged groups regarded as middle-class are in reality but part of a differentiated working class. They emphasise that: ‘The particular kinds of labor, skills, and jobs employed by capital are always undergoing change. Capital is not tied to any particular kind of concrete labor.’¹⁴

When Marx was writing Manifesto of the Communist Party it was, of course, much clearer who was the wage labourer and who was not. A clear distinction is much more problematic today. The differentiation of functions within the productive process, complicated by the separation of legal ownership and control, has made the line between labour and capital much more difficult to discern. Schaeffer and Weinstein, in fact, recognise this in practice. When they considered certain categories of labour, such as scientists and engineers, which they regarded as charged with implementing strategies of control over the working class, Schaeffer and Weinstein maintained that these groups did so as ‘representatives of capital’.¹⁵ The implications of this designation for the class situation of these workers were, however, not explored. Having argued against the existence of a new middle class within the capitalist mode of production, Schaeffer and Weinstein were unable to resolve the problem of the location of the cleavage between their expanded working class and labour that acts as agents of capital.

Other orthodox Marxist accounts of class structure solve the difficult problem of the location of the line of cleavage between the two classes by admitting that intermediate strata blur the demarcation line, while at the same time stressing the validity of a two-class theory. The Communist Parties of Europe, in particular, have found this device convenient for maintaining their adherence to ‘classical’ Marxism in principle, while at the same time attempting to come to terms with a changed reality. G. Ross, summarising the position of the French Communist Party (P.C.F.) in 1978 stated that:

The P.C.F.’s general outlook is that in state monopoly capitalism there exist only two real classes, the bourgeoisie and proletariat. However, it is obvious that all social groups within the system cannot be subsumed within these two classes, since there are strata which do not fit into either basic category. Between two major classes exist a panoply of what the P.C.F. calls couches intermédiaires…. For the P.C.F. there are not only no ‘new middle classes’, there are no ‘middle classes’ at all, but rather a series of strata lying between bourgeoisie and proletariat…. The outer boundary at one extreme of the couches intermédiaires is participation in exploitation (either as a direct employer of labour or as a managerial functionary), which confers bourgeois class membership.¹⁶

Furthermore, the European Communist Parties were also able to uphold the basic dynamic of class development as outlined by Marx in Manifesto of the Communist Party:

The general thrust of the P.C.F.’s analysis is to view all strata in society not immediately either bourgeois or proletarian as engaged in an historical process of becoming one or the other, as capitalism evolves … the general characteristic of the contemporary situation in France is that all of these groups have acquired deeper reasons to lean towards the working class.¹⁷

Similar perspectives are also held by the British Communist Party and can be summarised by the position outlined by Alan Hunt in his analysis of class structure in contemporary Britain. He argued that:

it [the ‘middle class’] certainly does not constitute a class in the Marxist use of that term, because its members do not share any objective unity of interests that separate them from the working class … it is necessary to reject the term middle class, and to insist on an analysis that examines the function of those who are neither employers nor manual workers. In particular it is necessary to concentrate on the functional relationship of the middle strata with the two main social classes in British society. That is, to distinguish between those whose primary economic activity is to carry out the functions of the capitalist, and are closely integrated with the success and failures of capitalism, and those whose primary position is the selling of their labour power.¹⁸

He considered the distinction sufficiently clear to conclude that ‘the vast majority of those in non-manual occupations, in that they sell their labour, and are exploited in the realisation of surplus value, are members of the working class’.¹⁹ Once more the processes of history were firmly o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Sociology, Marxism and the class structure of capitalist societies
• 2 Marx, Marxism and the new middle class
• 3 Monopoly capitalism and the rise of the new middle class
• 4 The state and the new middle class
• 5 The theory of middle-class trade unionism
• 6 The practice of middle-class unionism
• 7 Conclusion: the politics of the new middle class
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index