1.1 What Is at Stake?
Early in 1848, a 30-year-old German revolutionary, exiled in Brussels, despatched to his printer in London the text of a manifesto for an obscure organisation known as the Communist League. It closed with the slogan, âProletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!âââProletarians of all Countries, Unite!â (Marx [1848] 1977, p. 493; Nimtz 2000, pp. 52â55). At the time, the proletarians of all countries in the sense understood by Karl Marx, the originator of the slogan, must have amounted to a few million people. Even in Britain, by far the most industrialised country at that time, a slender majority of people still lived in the countryside; outside Britain, France, Belgium, Saxony, Prussia and the USA, there was no country in which more than a tenth of the population lived in towns or cities of 10,000 or more. Most of those on the land remained peasants engaged in small-scale, labour-intensive agricultural and handicraft production. Measured against the global population, the global proletariat was ânumerically negligibleâ, perhaps 5 or 6 per cent of the total (Hobsbawm 1994, p. 363; 2000, p. 205). Yet, a century and a half later, around 885 million were believed to be wage labourers (Filmer 1995, p. 38, Table 5-B). This growth has since accelerated. From 2013, for the first time in history, over half of those in the global workforce were, according to the International Labour Organization, now wage workers. They amount to some 1.6 billion people (ILO 2013).
Marxâs emphasis on the proletariat was premised not simply on the potential of the class to expand numerically and geographically but on a set of capacities and interests with which it was imbued by its social position. For Marx, these existed objectively, regardless of the state of consciousness of the working class or the level of struggle. As he wrote in The Holy Family, composed at the outset of his career as a revolutionary, âThe question is not what this or that proletarian, or even the whole of the proletariat, at the moment considers as its aim. The question is what the proletariat is, and what, consequent on that being, it will be compelled to doâ (Marx and Engels [1845] 1956, p. 53). It is the capacities and interests possessed by the proletariat, in contrast to the other classes of capitalist society, that make it, from Marxâs perspective, the potential agent of a social revolution that could overthrow capitalism and inaugurate a communist society.
Unsurprisingly, Marxâs propositions have from the outset been vigorously contested, whether by critics of a conservative, liberal or, a little later, social democratic, persuasion. However, what is striking today is the extent to which challenges to the Marxist position on class have become commonplace not simply among these critics but also among many who would identify with the radical left, including those who espouse âneo-Marxistâ or âpost-Marxist â approaches. These challengesâKevin Doogan (2009, p. 213) refers to them as âleft harmonies in the neoliberal chorusââtend to differ from more mainstream versions in that they see the shift in terms of a transformation of the working class, rooted in changes to (or occasionally supersession of) capitalism, robbing workers of their pre-existing capacities and interests. Workers once had potential power, of the kind identified by Marx; they do no longer. This change is typically seen as a product of the advent of neoliberalismâor post-Fordism, globalisation, post-industrialisation or various other terms denoting a period that opened up after the economic crises of the 1970s .
Consider the following contribution by Slavoj Ĺ˝iĹžek, among the most prominent radical left public intellectuals alive today. In a piece written in the London Review of Books in the wake of a strike by up to two and half million public sector workers in the UK in 2011 he argued, âThe category of the unemployed hasâŚexpanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slumsâ. Of the strikes, which involved local government workers, civil servants, teachers, lecturers and health workers, many of them extremely poorly paid by British standards, he added:
These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job is itself a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry, etc., but those privileged workers who have guaranteed jobs. (ŽiŞek 2012)
At the centre of such arguments are claims about the changing nature of employment relations and, specifically, the claim that employment has, for many or for most, become precarious. For brevity, thinkers arguing that a sweeping change of this kind has taken place will be referred to here as the theorists of transformation.
In one sense, it is not surprising that such views have taken hold most firmly among thinkers of the radical left. Many of the earliest critiques of what is now called precarity emerged in the late 1990s in intimate contact with social movements, only later permeating through academia (Bove et al. 2017, pp. 1â2). However, today these views have echoes in many areas of discourse. Among those engaged in the sociology of work, employment relations theory or labour economics , who tend to reject the most extreme claims about the transformation of the working class, the notion of growing precarity is often part of the common sense. It is also an assumption frequently made by politicians of both the left and the right in the UK. In November 2016, the then Conservative Work and Pensions Secretary, Damian Green, gave a speech on the emergence of a âgig economyâ, characterised by workers holding a self-employed status and undertaking work for an array of employers. He was reported as saying:
Just a few years ago the idea of a proper job meant a job that brings in a fixed monthly salary, with fixed hours, paid holidays, sick pay, a pension scheme and other contractual benefits. But the gig economy has changed all that⌠People now own their time and control who receives their services and when. They can pick and mix their employers, their hours, their offices, their holiday patterns. This is one of the most significant developments in the labour market . (Stone 2016)
In the same month, Labourâs shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, John McDonnell (2016), wrote, âPrecarious jobs and zero-hours contracts have become the norm in huge sectors of our labour marketâ. There may be disagreement about whether the development is an exciting opportunity or a tragedy, but there is agreement here about the rise of new forms of work that lack the traditional character of an ongoing relationship between the employer and the employee. Indeed, in summer 2017, in response to such putative changes, Matthew Taylor published a review into modern employment practices commissioned by the UK government. Although precarity is never explicitly mentioned, references to the âgig economyâ, âzero-hours contractsâ and other forms of temporary work appear regularly (Taylor et al. 2017). The notion of growing precarity also informs the thinking of trade unions in the UK, with a recent report by the Trade Union Congress identifying âprecarious workâ, âthe sharp increase in zero-hours contractsâ and rising insecurity among âbetter paid staffâ as scourges of the modern labour market (TUC 2015).
This book is motivated by scepticism about such claims, and about the unalterably abject condition of the working class that it evokes. That is not to say that the working class has flourished and prospered during the neoliberal period. On the contrary, the working class has suffered considerably in recent decadesâand in particular in the period since the economic crisis that began in 2008. However, the attacks faced by workers have not necessarily taken the form of rendering them precarious or transforming large sections of the working class into a âprecariat â (Standing 2011). If I am correct in this claim, then, despite historically low levels of collective struggle by workers, the working class may be in a better position to challenge and reverse these attacks than is generally thought even by those on the radical left .
This book, then, explores the strong claims of changes to class and employment made by the theorists of ...