Class Matters

Inequality and Exploitation in 21st Century Britain

Charles Umney

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786802460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziale Klassen & wirtschaftliche Ungleichheit

Social class remains a fundamental presence in British life in the twenty-first century. It is woven into the very fabric of social and political discourse, undiminished by the end of mass industry; unaugmented despite the ascendancy of 'ordinary working people' and other substitute phrases. Absent from this landscape, however, is any compelling Marxist expression or analysis of class. In Class Matters, Charles Umney brings Marxist analysis out of the 19th century textiles mill, and into the call centres, office blocks and fast food chains of modern Britain. He shows how core Marxist concepts are vital to understanding increasing pay inequality, decreasing job security, increasing routinisation and managerial control of the labour process. Providing a critical analysis of competing perspectives, Umney argues that class must be understood as a dynamic and exploitative process integral to capitalism - rather than a descriptive categorisation - in order for us to better understand the gains capital has made at the expense of labour over the last four decades.

1

The ‘Economy that Works for Everyone’

PLATITUDES

I will govern for the whole United Kingdom and we will look to build an economy that works for everyone, not just the privileged few.

Theresa May, after becoming prime minister of the United Kingdom, July 2016

We want to see a break with the failed economic orthodoxy that has gripped policymakers for a generation, and set out a very clear vision for a Labour government that will create an economy that works for all not just the few.

Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party, May 2016

Class is a communist concept … it groups people together and sets them against each other.

Margaret Thatcher, 1992¹

Very few people claim they want an economy that only works for some. Given this, we might wonder why senior politicians keep talking about how they want an economy that works for everyone. If everyone agrees on this, why keep bringing it up as if it were controversial?

The idea of the economy that ‘works for everyone’ is a platitude. It is something that is sufficiently vague that nobody could really disagree, and which nobody ever gets around to defining. British politics runs on these kinds of statements. Certain things are so roundly accepted as good that their actual meaning is rarely questioned: important platitudes of the last decade have included ‘balancing the budget’ and ‘social mobility’. More recently, these have been usurped by ‘taking back control’ and, as things have become more and more chaotic, ‘certainty’ and ‘stability’ (these last ones looking more grimly ironic by the day). These are all empty phrases on to which listeners can impute anything they like. Conversely, there are other phrases with equally little definition that are used to signify Bad Things: ‘red tape’, ‘Westminster elites’, ‘magic money tree’ and so on.

The platitude of the economy that works for everyone is a particularly important one, because of the sense of fuzzy warmth it provides. It conveys the idea that British society could and should be one big harmonious unit, where the prosperity of one means the prosperity of all, so long as a few issues can be ironed out. As with a healthy human body after the removal of an inflamed appendix, once a specific problem has been dealt with, the remaining entity is basically one in which all the different bits act in harmony. This is a good, uplifting message.

But such an economy has evidently not arrived and seems unlikely to do so in the imminent future. So the business of politics becomes the business of identifying new problems that can explain the delay, and this is where the message becomes less inspirational. There is no shortage of groups or entities that act as the social equivalent of the inflamed appendix, and politicians have competed to find the most relevant ones. On this basis, in the years following the financial crisis of 2008, the political right clearly did much better: migrants, the European Union, the unemployed and benefits claimants* evidently captured voters’ imagination more than left-wing concerns like inequality, ‘the bankers’ and ‘irresponsible capitalists’.² There has been a shifting astrology of blame which has, at times, become surreal and dreamlike, even extending at one point to people who don’t have alarm clocks^† or who leave their blinds closed.³ Sure signs of unacceptable sloth.

The idea of class poses a problem for these kinds of platitudes, because it suggests that there are more deep-rooted and intractable divisions in society that cannot be resolved without significant upheaval – hence Margaret Thatcher’s rejection of the very concept, in the quote above, as one imported from communist ideology. It alludes to tensions that are imprinted on the heart of society and define the way it works, when actually it is much easier to parcel out smaller, more manageable evils, whether they are real or not. So it seemed, until quite recently, that class had become very unwelcome in mainstream political discussion.

The Labour Party had a big hand in this. In its New Labour period, it had a quaintly uplifting message: yes, class used to matter and it used to be terrible, back in the pre-war era when people worked in hellish factory conditions. But now we’ve had Labour governments, along with the National Health Service (NHS), the welfare state, workers’ rights, and so on, and as a result class is not a problem anymore. It still exists, but if we can make sure we have ‘equality of opportunity’ (as if this is possible when people start life under such different conditions) then class divisions don’t have to be divisive.

Since then the Labour Party’s abandonment of class has come back to haunt it. The political right in Britain became far keener to talk about class than before. Politicians such as Theresa May and Nigel Farage sought to build a close association between the idea of the ‘working class’ and a particular set of opinions, most notably related to immigration. They cultivated a widespread conventional wisdom that ‘ordinary people’ were sick of immigration and the EU, while ‘liberal elites’ loved immigration and hated native British people. This message, while dependent on some fairly self-serving stereotypes, proved quite resonant, and did the Labour Party very severe damage, particularly in the general election defeat of 2015 and in the Brexit referendum, which led to huge internal tensions and agonising. In 2017, as May began to look increasingly weak and Labour appeared to be gaining ground under Corbyn, the issue of class once again became hazy in British politics. For instance, we were told that age is now a far more important division than class, and had largely usurped the latter as a means of explaining people’s voting choices.⁴

This erratic and unfocused discussion of class, sometimes dismissive, usually vague, always self-serving, comes about mainly because the concept is nowadays generally understood as a kind of cultural identification. It is associated with certain accents or certain kinds of job, or the kinds of music or TV programmes people like; who their friends are, the values they emphasise and the kinds of newspapers they read. Consequently, some of the people who talk about class most often are self-conscious liberal broadsheet journalists, fretting over whether or not they are allowed to pass judgement on people who read The Sun. There is a vast body of academic research on how to categorise people into different classes according to these social and cultural differences. I will summarise some of this later.

While recognising the insights that some of this literature can provide, I want to get away from this kind of thing. In the Marxist reading, class is about something different. It is not, at root, about culture, but about the position people occupy within the structure of an economy, including the economic function they fulfil and the demands and imperatives they face as a result. Some people own businesses and invest money in them in order to make a profit. Other people depend on their ability to sell their time and skills in exchange for a wage. Some have managerial roles whereby they need to control and regulate the second group in the interests of the first, while others might be involved in moving money about, or maintaining social order. Often, the interests of people in these different positions conflict.

The basic argument here is that these economic roles matter more than cultural or social identifiers: they are the building blocks of the capitalist economy, and the differences and conflicting interests between them not only affect people’s experiences and the pressures they face in their own lives, but also have much bigger implications for wider society and government. So class is not just about classification: if we look at the most important changes in British political economy since the 1970s (which I will consider in Chapter 3), we can see that these changes did not just affect class relationships, but they were also affected by them. Before getting on to this, however, I will look in more depth at how discussion around class has developed in Britain over the last decade.

CLASS SINCE THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

Britain, like many other countries, had a brief glimpse of what we might call ‘class consciousness’ following the financial crisis of 2008. The financial sector was identified as the main cause of the downturn, and for a while the phrase ‘the bankers’ became closely associated with various adjectives: greed, trickery, short-sightedness. There was a consensus that large financial institutions had taken on too much risk in order to make more money for themselves, and that everyone else was facing the consequences.

On the surface this seems like a fertile context for class conflict. There was, certainly, a lot of protest, and groups on the radical left momentarily seemed marginally more relevant than they had done for years. Most notable here was the Occupy movement, which began in the US and spread to various other countries. Occupy groups gained publicity by staging highly visible protests in centres of financial activity, including outside St Paul’s Cathedral. They set up tents and stayed there for several months, holding debates, making banners and so on.

These movements were highly successful in some respects. Mainly, they got people talking about the things they thought were important. The use of words and phrases such as ‘inequality’ or ‘corporate greed’ in the media spiked following their protests, and declined again as Occupy’s profile diminished.⁵

But to what extent was Occupy about class? It aimed itself at bankers and the politicians with whom they were presumed to be in cahoots. They argued that these people had stitched the system up and had become extremely rich at everyone else’s expense. They had a slogan to this effect: ‘the 1 per cent versus the 99 per cent’. The problem with this slogan is that it is vague. For one thing, it relies on the conspiratorial idea that society is governed by a tiny elite out for themselves, as opposed to a chaotic society in which elites are as confused as everyone else. With the benefit of hindsight, which of these seems to work better as a description of the Cameron–Clegg years? Or the minority Conservative Brexit government? Capitalist economies are more confusing and unpredictable than this.

The slogan also buys into the ‘economy that works for everyone’ platitude. There is this tiny group who need to be brought down a peg or several, but beyond that everyone else exists on the side of righteousness. Lumped into the 99 per cent are everyone from students, the homeless, professional and blue-collar employees, the unemployed, the retired, small businesses and, implicitly, large businesses that work in ‘good’ areas like manufacturing rather than duplicitous financiers with their hocus pocus.

This ‘intuitive populism’⁶ was its main selling point, directed at a ‘1 per cent’ which is highly opaque but found colourful personification in the actions of particular individuals, such as the former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin. Very obvious, unambiguous bad guys, who made it easy to parcel off a small niche of society as the villains who were ruining it for everyone else. If this is class politics, it is a very narrow and personalised version.

Occupy deserves credit for pressuring British politicians, even Conservative ones, to talk a lot more than they used to about inequality and corporate greed. But these terms are fuzzy. Fighting against inequality, for instance, has long been a rallying cry of the left, but the word ‘inequality’ is surprisingly easily subsumed into dry and technocratic language. What is inequality, really? Often, it is encapsulated in an esoterically calculated figure (i.e. the Gini coefficient) that sometimes gets higher (which is bad) or lower (which is good), and which can be manhandled in support of any argument. For example, Britain’s Gini coefficient may well decline if economic instability takes a chunk out of elite incomes, as occurred in 2010–11,⁷ but this does not mean that anything particularly profound or emancipatory has happened.

The danger of this technocratic fuzziness is that the left’s rhetoric fizzles out, and this is indeed what happened in the years immediately after the crisis. David Cameron, the prime minister at the time of Occupy’s activity, was able to reel off his own statistics that said inequality was falling, enabling every potentially damaging exchange on the topic to disperse into a fog of numbers. Politicians on the centre-left were repeatedly naive about how widely the anti-inequality message would resonate. Concern with inequality is not a new thing in Britain: the number of British people who think that the gap between rich and poor is too wide has been very high for years and looks like remaining so. But what declined throughout the 1990s and 2000s was people’s inclination to actually do anything about it. By 2010, the number of people supporting policies that redistribute wealth had sunk to about one in three, compared to over half in 1991.⁸ The effect of several years of austerity and high-profile attacks on welfare recipients (such as the harshly punitive ‘bedroom tax’) did not have a substantial effect on this general lack of interest.⁹ Corbyn’s strategy relied on the idea that people were starting to care again, but this cannot be assumed.

So while the old (pre-2015) centre-left put too much faith in people’s outrage at inequality, the right were highly adept at finding a narrative which was in many respects less accurate (the idea that the financial crisis was a result of Gordon Brown ‘spending all the money’ on benefits claimants) but, paradoxically, felt more real. They realised that very few people identified as ‘the 99 per cent’. Instead, they pursued a strategy of flattery. David Cameron and George Osborne developed a category that people actually wanted to feel like they were part of. This was the idea of ‘hardworking people’, and it was given its appeal by the sense, reinforced by government, that there were a lot of lazy people about. Everyone knows a lazy person with whom they like to contrast themselves.

The hardworking person became the model citizen of the austerity era: they accepted that we were ‘all in it together’, and that you had to pull your weight by making sacrifices without complaining. This idea was fleshed out in sometimes poetic ways. The hardworking person was enraged by the sight of their neighbours’ curtains being drawn (George Osborne talking on the r...