L. Schwartz
Lecture for Making of the Modern World Module
Feb 2013
Nothing has got historians knickers in a twist as much as class. (Except, perhaps, gender and race, but thankfully I don’t have to give a lecture on those!) Class is a notoriously difficult concept for historians to pin down. And it has been at the centre of debates arising from the intellectual developments of the past thirty or so years. So I’m going to start simple in this lecture, and give you a basic outline what Karl Marx – that old dead white guy responsible for all the pages and pages written on this subject – thought about class. And then I’ll move onto to some of the complications and critiques of this Marxist theory of class. As we move through I’ll be trying to combine two questions: Firstly, how classes emerged, developed and were transformed throughout history. And secondly, how historians have thought about class and how this has changed over time.
Section 1. So, first of all Karl Marx and class. This will be a little re-cap for you from your previous lecture on Marx and Lenin, so I’m going to ease you in before it gets difficult. Marx argued that society had always been divided into classes – the haves and the have nots, to put it crudely. In feudal European societies this had been the landowners and the peasants. But what interested
Marx the most was the kinds of classes that came into being after the industrial revolution. In industrialised society – which was only coming into being in
Western Europe and particularly Britain as Marx was writing in the mid-to-late nineteenth century – there were three classes. The aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Each of these classes – and this is important – each of these classes was defined as a class not by the clothes they wore or the accents they spoke with or whether they used balsamic vinegar or salad cream, but by their
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L. Schwartz position within the economic system, by their relationship to the means of production.
The aristocracy were landowners who lived on unearned income from the rent on their land. But these were becoming less important in an industrialising society where wealth was generated less by agriculture and increasingly by industry. The people Marx was really interested in was the bourgeoisie – who, as captains of industry and proprietors of large businesses – owned the means of production. And he was of course concerned with the proletariat, the people who had once been peasants but now, ripped off their land, had no means to support themselves except through selling their labour power.
Class, therefore, for Marx was a thing, a structure. Class was, for Marx and many Marxists after him, an objective category. According to this viewpoint there is an economic base (who owns what, who controls the earth’s resources) and from that material economic base everything else arises (a social world in which people relate to each other; human culture; ways of living). As Marx was to write on many occasions, material existence determines consciousness; it doesn’t happen the other way round. In this model, ideas and thinking don’t come first; material existence comes first. Marx wrote in his Preface to the
Critique of Political Economy in 1859:
‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.’
So Marx was concerned not just with a class ‘of itself’ (the objective economic category) but also with a class ‘for itself’. What does this mean? A clue is given in the quotation that I’ve just read out. Marx was concerned especially with
class consciousness: The process by which the working class became conscious of itself and its relationship to other classes; of the inequality of their position vis a vis the middle class; of the fact that they did all the work and
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L. Schwartz their bosses got all the profit. Class consciousness implied a shared identity with other members of one’s class, a collective history, a group trajectory and common objectives.
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So that’s a very speedy description of the Marxist understanding of class which came to be so influential for the next 150 or so years. But before I move on to start talking about how his ideas were taken up, expanded and critiqued, I just want to emphasise that these ideas didn’t come out of nowhere. Firstly, people have always attempted to make sense of the horribly unequal social worlds they have inhabited, and have invariably ended up using some kind of model which describes either a tripartite system – the rich, the poor and the middling sort – or even more crudely a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
2 Secondly, Marx and also his old pal Engels, were attempting to make sense of the specific changes that were occurring around them in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. When peasants were rapidly decreasing in number, people were moving to the industrialised cities to find work, slaving away in the most horrific conditions while other men made huge profits out of their labour. It is because Marx’s conception of class seemed to describe the world around us for so long, and appeared such a precise description of the capitalist system, that his ideas had so much purchase – especially among historians.
Section 2. Class and History Writing
Marx’s view of class was, in itself, an expressly historical understanding of class
– history was at the centre of his conception of class and how it worked. He and
Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto ‘The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’. What did he mean by this? Well, the story, according to Marx and Engels, goes something like this: First there is the material world: the soil, the earth, the sea; and the things that can be produced out of it; men and women, struggling to keep alive, to find food to eat, use the material world, gain different kinds of access to it;
1 David Cannadine, Class in Britain (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p.4.
2 Ibid., p.20.
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L. Schwartz some come to own it, some are prevented from gaining the means of subsistence. Some gain actual possession of it; owning the land and the means of production they cut others off from it. Interest groups – classes – form in relation to these interests. In the middle ages this means Feudal lords across
Europe own the land ; they are in conflict with the landless, who own nothing.
But with the rise of trade and industry a new class emerges, the middling sort or the bourgeoisie, who increasingly have economic power but no political power. They struggle to wrest control away from the aristocracy, and do so in what become known as bourgeois revolutions such as the English Civil War and the French Revolution of 1789. But, according to Marx the historian, the bourgeois revolution would inevitably be followed by a proletarian revolution – for the bourgeoisie were their own gravediggers. They created a new class, the proletariat, who with nothing to sell but their labour power, with nothing to lose but their chains, would come to seize the means of production for themselves.
This is a clear historical teleology which many historians came to identify within the particular periods of history that they studied. This was particularly the case with a group of British Marxist historians who were writing in the
1950s and 60s. Christopher Hill, for example, wrote about the English Civil War as the first bourgeois revolution. George Rude wrote about 18 th century France.
And, pride of place on your reading list for this week, Warwick based historian
EP Thompson wrote about the ‘Making of the English Working Class’. (Just as an aside, note that I am talking about Britain a lot this week, not just because I am a naughty British historian who doesn’t pay attention to what’s going on elsewhere, but also because Britain was seen as the laboratory, the testing ground for capitalist developments that would eventually come to take place elsewhere). So the kind of Marxist history that is being written sees itself in some sense as a universal history, a historical path down which eventually the whole world would travel.
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Now, as you will know, whenever historians attempt to impose a theoretical model onto their empirical, historical case studies, problems arise. This is because, unlike sociologists, the primary material which historians work with is the particular, complex, messy stuff of lived history. We tend to start with our case studies and then look around afterwards for theories to explain them.
Therefore, a too dogmatic adherence to Marxist understandings of class can lead to a mechanistic history in which the material is either twisted to fit with the theory, or the two levels of analysis – theory and case study – are not adequately integrated.
3 This has been one criticism levelled at Marxist historians seeking to impose the model of class we have just talked about.
HOWEVER, I want to stress that this has by no means always been the case for historians influenced by Marx. Rather, inspired by Marx’s conception of class and especially class consciousness, historians have nuanced and expanded his approach to write some truly fantastic history. The British Marxist Historians
Group, which I mentioned a minute ago, are good examples of how Marx’s theories came to inspire a whole new approach to social history in general.
Inspired by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, they began to look more closely at the culture of class – at how class consciousness manifested itself in the oral traditions, communities, consumption patterns, jokes and songs, for example, of the working-class in the early nineteenth-century. Class, for EP
Thompson, was not just a thing, a structure, but an experience of both work and life which led the men (because he didn’t talk much about women) who worked in the factories and the mills, to see themselves as part of a single working class with common interests and objectives. Eric Hobsbawm, in the
Age of Empire which was part of your core reading for this week, does a similar thing for the European middle-classes when he describes how the bourgeoisie distinguished themselves from all those engaged in manual labour through their lifestyles and culture – they sent their children to university to show that they were able to postpone their earning a living, they employed servants, and
3 Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), p.69.
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L. Schwartz they trained their son’s to excel at gentlemen’s sport.
4 So we see here a less economistic and more cultural view of class was already developing among the
Marxist Historians Group and the social history that they pioneered, while still being committed to a broad Marxist conception of class in history.
Section 3. Historical Change and the End of the Working Class?
Now I’m going to move on to look at some of the challenges to Marxist conceptions of class, and I’m going to shift from talking about historians to talking about history – about what was actually happening out there in the world and how this might have had an impact on the kind of things that were being written about class. I said earlier that Marx’s conception of class was in many ways a good descriptor of the world he saw around him – a world in which bourgeois exploited proletarian from whom they were separated by a social and cultural gulf. However, what happens to such as theory when the world around you begins to change and no longer looks so much like that which Marx sought to explain?
After the Second World War, capitalism underwent rapid change and global expansion. Industry and manufacturing – the classic working class jobs in the steel works and coal mines for example – went into decline in the West as these businesses began to migrate to the global South. From the late 1970s the number of people in the Western world employed in traditionally working class
(that is manual and industrial) trades dropped dramatically. Britain lost 25 per cent of its manufacturing industry between 1980 and 1984. The formerly massive US steel industry now employed few people than McDonald’s hamburger chains.
5 Old manual trades were giving way to jobs in the service sector or the information technology sector. The classic image of the industrial city, which fostered strong working class communities, was in decline. No longer did the majority of a town’s workers get up each morning at the same
4 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p.174.
5 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael
Joseph, 1994), pp.303-4.
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L. Schwartz time to attend work in the same factory, to sit alongside each other on the same conveyor belt making the same manufactured good. No longer did they walk home together, go to the pub together, sit next to each other at the football match on a Saturday. Now the picture I’m painting here is deliberately clichéd and sentimental but I’m doing it to stress a point. Which is that common working lives and common leisure pursuits and living together in the same geographic community allowed working-class people to see themselves as a collective, to create their own communities and cultures, to develop that kind of class consciousness that we talked about earlier – to see themselves as part of a single working class and ‘to regard that fact as by far the most important thing about their situation as human beings in society. Or at least enough of them came to this conclusion to make parties and movements which appealed to them essentially as workers’ 6 – parties like the Labour Party whose name can tell us a great deal; and organisations like trade unions with slogans such as
‘together we are stronger’.
By contrast, the new industrial and capitalist model was one of people working in short-term, unskilled service sector jobs which were much harder to take pride in. Or in ‘mosaics or networks of enterprises ranging from the cottage workshop to the modest (but high tech) manufactory, spread across town and country.’ Think about the kinds of jobs that you do now, and the kinds of jobs you are likely to go into when you leave university. According to Marx’s definition, most of you will fall into the category of working class (unless you have a private income generated by your landed estate or a secret business you own somewhere). If you become an academic like me you will, by Marx’s definition, be a worker in that you will have nothing to sell but your labour power – you must work for a wage to stay alive. Yet you are likely to be employed on a short term contract, with little or no job security. You might even be doing hourly paid teaching in several universities around the country.
You do not even have a single place of work, let alone live with or even know
6 Ibid., p.305.
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L. Schwartz the people you work with. It is quite hard to build a collective class identity under such conditions. Or at least not the kind that so many Marxist historians sought to uncover in the past.
Under these new socio-economic conditions, so the argument goes, new identities emerge. The Post-War era also witnessed the rise of consumer culture, whereby mass produced goods became available to people who previously would not have been able to afford them. The lifestyles of working class and middle class people are no longer so separate and segregated – almost everyone can afford a TV and most people can afford a car. What we buy becomes as important, if not more important, in defining our identity than what we produce at work.
The dramatic expansion of higher education in the 1960s means that larger and larger numbers of people can go to university (although we must be careful about this because it is still less than half the population) – but at any rate university was no longer the preserve of the aristocracy and the big bourgeoisie.
Universities also generated something else – youth and student culture, whereby the generation gap in the 1960s and 70s was sometimes seen as more important than class in defining who you identified and aligned with. The world was now divided, in some people’s eyes, between the young and the old, rather than between the working-class and the middle-class. Such identities were further fractured and complicated by the emergence of sub-cultures – mod versus rocker, punk versus hippy etc etc – all identities which were signified by how one dressed or what music one listened to rather than by where or how one worked.
In the 1960s, 70s and 80s class also began to be displaced in the political realm, as what became known as ‘identity politics’ when the women’s, black and gay liberation movements came to the fore. Class was no longer the key identity or position you decided to organise around if you wanted to change the world.
This did not mean that a class analysis disappeared in these new movements,
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L. Schwartz but that class identity itself was complicated and challenged to include people beyond the white male worker who had figured so largely in historical conceptions of the labour movement.
Now, again I’ve painted a very crude picture here of the kinds of changes that
Western Europe witnessed in the Post-War era. And I don’t want you to swallow this story hook line and sinker. As I shall go onto argue, class did and does still remain central in shaping our society. But the way in which class had been conceptualised in the 19 th and early 20 th century by Karl Marx and others, was coming to look increasingly outdated as a way to explain the world around us. And, as I’m sure you all know, history writing and intellectual developments more generally don’t take place in a vacuum but are fundamentally shaped by the wider socio-economic developments. So let’s leave the hustle and bustle of the real world and return to the ivory tower to talk about how all these material changes affected the ideas that scholars and historians have had about class.
Section 4. Scholarly Critiques of Class as a Concept
With the rise of identity politics and social movements in the political sphere, so came the emergence of feminist history and Black history: historians interested in how gender and race had come to operate historically. Feminist historians especially began to critique a history of the working class which had focused primarily on the white male factory worker. They noted first of all that women had on the whole been left out of these histories – and they asked how relevant a history of the working class could be which excluded fifty per cent of the people who made it up. Not all working-class experience could be fitted into the paradigmatic account given in many Marxist influenced histories.
Women’s experience of work and life were very different from those of men, they noted. And moreover, there were many tensions and conflicts between the sexes which served to erode a sense of class solidarity.
7 You can look at Joan
7 Cannadine, Class in Britain , p.11.
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Scott’s critique of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, and
Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches (both of which are on your reading list) for an account of the rivalries and misogynistic agendas which constituted male class identity in the nineteenth-century. The working class was not, argued feminist historians and historians of race, a coherent whole but made up of multiple identities which sometimes reinforced a sense of class community but which also divided it.
This prompted many other historians to look again at histories of class in the nineteenth and twentieth century and to question to idea of a coherent and homogenous working class existing at that time. The boundaries between the middle and working classes were seen to be more blurred than had previously been thought. The middle class was a notoriously difficult concept to define, especially with the rise of the white collar sector among its lower echelons. In the late nineteenth century ‘side by side with and overshadowing the old pettybourgeoisie of independent artisans and small shopkeepers, there now grew up the new petty-bourgeoisie of office, shop and subaltern administration… their incomes might not be higher than the skilled artisan’s… However, their status placed them unquestionably above the labouring masses.’ 8
So the notion of class as a thing – as a structure – defined by one’s economic position vis a vis the mode of production, was increasingly seen to be complicated by something called status which operated in the realm of culture and was much harder to pin down. ‘The unifying experience of labouring activity [going to work] in the creation of class consciousness’ was increasingly called into question. Just as other experiences tended to define one’s identity in the late twentieth century world, could this not have also been the case in the nineteenth century? ‘Historians of leisure, of domesticity, and of consumption have discovered social groupings and social relationships which were often significantly different than those found by historians of work…’ 9
8 Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 , pp.180-4.
9 Cannadine, Class in Britain , p.10.
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Poststructuralist or what can loosely be termed postmodernist theories underpinned this critique and questioning of the Marxist, economistic model of class. Remember that the Marxist model saw material conditions – the relationship to the means of production – as determining social relations and the kinds of consciousness which came with them. But the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in history and other disciplines questioned the idea that there was such a thing as an external referent or reality outside of language, which could determine someone’s class. Language did not just reflect ‘reality’ but actually created it. Class was simply a set of words by which people imagined the social order, and the identities that emerged from this were volatile and complex.
Identities were not stable but were subject to change, and a single individual might carry with him or her various different identities. There was no such thing, according to the more extreme versions of this poststructuralist theory, as THE working class, but rather only individuals carrying with them a kaleidoscope of identities structured through language and culture which were subject to shifts and transformations.
Conclusion.
Does all this mean that there is really no such thing as class in our society anymore? That it is merely an identity claimed by some people and not by others? I would argue no. First of all, it is clear that structural inequality exists in our society, now more than ever. If there is no relationship between politics and class formation, why, then are we governed by a cabinet of millionaires?
Why are fifty per cent of Oxbridge students privately educated compared to the national figure of seven per cent? And while many more people attend university today than they did fifty years ago, still under half of the population never have the opportunity of higher education. And under the regime of cuts and austerity and its dismantling of the welfare state, the gap between rich and poor in Western Europe is ever growing. To say that work is no longer a significantly defining experience for us in an age when we spend as much of
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L. Schwartz half of our life at work, working longer and longer hours and even weekends, seems questionable to say the least.
But should this structural inequality be described in terms of class? Do people identify with a class enough to organise around this identity to fight for social change. Is that potential still there even if it’s not happening right now? Is class still alive but class consciousness dead? Are the new anti-cuts movements such as Occupy and UK Uncut class orientated movements or movements of a multitude? How are we to interpret new trade unions formed by mainly migrant workers? If there is no such thing as class, why then do people still use the word ‘Chav’ as a term of abuse? All of these are questions that scholars continue to ponder over, and they are all questions that you are going to need to ask yourselves in the coming seminar.
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Bibliography
C
ANNADINE
, D
AVID
, Class in Britain (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
H
OBSBAWM
, E
RIC
, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1987).
---, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael
Joseph, 1994).
J ORDANOVA , L UDMILLA , History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000).
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