Est. reading time: 50 mins.
Introduction
On October 27 2021, Howard Beckett, a leftish British trade unionist, published a tweet outlining his idea of a socialist economy. Although I didn’t think he was really describing socialism, at least his list included many elements of a more democratic society. So I replied with what I would have thought would be the foundational principle of any socialist economy, which Beckett had not mentioned:
Workers’ control of the means of production?
This seemed pretty uncontroversial to me, though not perhaps to the average British trade unionist, member of the Labour Party or to anyone further to the right than that – which is, admittedly, almost everyone. So I was not very surprised to quickly receive the following reply:
That’s worked in lots of places – not
I won’t say who it was from – you can find out if you really want to, but that’s not really the point. They were only saying what I would guess most people think. But I still felt obliged to reply. So…
Name me one place where the workers (not the state)
were in control of the means of production.
I emphasised this point – direct control by the workers rather than the state – because this is a trap socialists frequently fall into, especially in the UK: they confuse socialisation with nationalisation. But nationalisation is just direct state control, and is as much a right-wing policy as a left-wing policy. Any regime seeking to develop or protect an industry they believe is important to a nation’s (or their allies’) economic interests can nationalise it, and a nationalised industry will be manipulated according to whatever ends the party in power is pursuing. Despite the rhetoric, liberals, conservatives and socialists have all turned out to be pretty happy to have nationalised industries at their disposal, though they tend to do different things with them. And of course, nationalised industries are usually administered by civil servants (or something very close), and there’s certainly no reason to think they are committed to socialism. Finally, when nationalisation is used by a left-wing government but the economy as a whole remains firmly capitalist, the benefits to society as a whole are questionable.
Hence, I think, Engels’ reservations:
Therein precisely lies the rub; for, so long as the propertied classes remain at the helm, nationalisation never abolishes exploitation but merely changes its form — in the French, American or Swiss republics no less than in monarchist Central, and despotic Eastern, Europe.[1]
The same applies to many of the other items on Howard Beckett’s list – which is the reason they don’t really describe a ‘socialist’ economy, as he claims. A real socialist economy would be one that couldn’t serve any interests but those of the workers, and was directly controlled by the workers themselves. Hence my preference for the term ‘socialisation’.
However, my correspondent ignored this point, preferring to reply (pretty predictably):
It’s such a bad idea nobody has bothered to try it
Leaving aside the shifting argument (if ‘nobody has bothered to try it’ then it can’t be true that ‘that’s worked in lots of places – not’), this is such a common response that I thought I ought to at least try to find out exactly what they thought the problem was. So I replied:
Explain to me why.
The answer revealed an assumption about my original comment that I believe is also implicit in a great deal of left-wing analysis.
Define means of production – do you mean workers (normal every day people who earn an average wage?) now controlling companies like Glaxo / Land Rover / Lloyd’s / GKN etc etc and being able to define strategy and carry the Companies forward - complete cock up comes to mind
This suggested a narrow but pretty traditional idea of who ‘the workers’ are, so I replied:
No, by workers I mean all employees – which also means designers, analysts, architects, strategists, investment teams, etc. All the board does is represent the owners and it’s been a long while since the owners did anything but siphon off the profits made by other people.
The reply simply side-stepped my response, shifting instead to a quite different issue:
And how do the companies get investment funds???
To which I replied:
Same way they do now. Most investments are funded out of profits or loans based on corporate value/performance. It’s a century since the capitalists personally made the investments.
I could also have mentioned various methods of manipulating shares, organising government support, and so on, but I doubt that it would have made any difference. This time there was no come-back, at least not from that particular individual. Again, I wasn’t surprised: that’s the usual limit of the argument. By and large it was the kind of exchange any socialist might have any day of the week. But even as I wrote I reflected (for the hundredth time) that, if this is the level of popular understanding of socialism and capitalism, then socialists everywhere have a long hard road in front of them, just to get people to understand the basic mechanics of society. And at the same time, I was not at all sure that the assumptions implicit in this exchange are not also shared by many of my fellow socialists, who would consequently struggle to explain a coherently socialist position. This worries me every bit as much as the first point.
So what follows is an effort to elaborate the above exchange and come up with a coherent picture of exactly what the central yet unmentioned term in this entire argument – proletariat – really means.
1. Who are the workers?
Back to my interlocutor’s idea of who ‘the workers’ are – ‘normal every day people who earn an average wage’. If that were what I meant too, their conclusion – ‘complete cock up comes to mind’ – would be justified: it would be hard for most of the people working in modern businesses to run those organisations – the parts, yes perhaps, the whole no. That calls for a range of skills the great majority of workers simply don’t have – investment, strategy, business analysis, product development, planning, systems design and architecture, organisation, recruitment, training, accounting, and so on. And without the individuals and groups who carry out this work, not only individual organisations but also entire industrial economies would collapse, taking with them society as a whole.
So if ‘the workers’ aren’t doing this work, who is? The answer is, the middle class. In fact to a large extent, ‘the middle class’ is simply a shorthand term for all the managers, professionals, administrators, consultants, and others who carry out this work. And the work they do is plainly vital.
So clearly working and middle classes can both be thought of as workers. And equally clearly, if, in conventional English (perhaps especially British English), the word ‘workers’ refers specifically to the working class, there is a sense in which this is a mistake.
But there is still a distinction that needs to be made here. It is true that the middle class works, but it is equally clear that the work they carry out is very different from the work of the working class.[2] By and large, the phrase ‘the workers’ refers to the people on the front line of the economy – the individuals who operate the machines, work the mines, milk the cows, build the factories and office blocks, drive the trains, crew the ships and do the clerical work on which both individual companies and the economy as a whole depend. From coal to cars to insurance policies, this is the work that actually creates the end-product their employers sell and so make the profit. This is the work of the working class. The middle class don’t do these direct production tasks. Exactly what the middle classes do do will be dealt with shortly, but for the moment it can be said that they definitely don’t do what the working class do.
So if calling only the working class ‘workers’ is confusing, it’s also a useful choice of words, because it captures this difference between those who carry out direct production work and those who don’t. And that, I guess, is why my partner in the above Twitter exchange assumed that, when I mentioned ‘the workers’, I was referring exclusively to working class people – the ‘normal every day people who earn an average wage’. The confusion is understandable. These are after all ‘the workers’ in this stereotypical sense. Yet they were not the only people I had in mind. No, I meant all those who work – who labour, who are involved, however indirectly, in producing the means to our collective ends, who are employed by the corporations (and governments) that dominate our world, who are paid a wage, and so on. Hence my expansion of the concept of ‘workers’ to include ‘all employees – which also means designers, analysts, architects, strategists, investment teams, etc.’.
So the term ‘worker’ in ambiguous. Is there another word we can use – another rubric under which, even though working-class and middle-class work are separate and even opposed now, one day they might not be?
2. Who are the proletariat?
Let me begin by defining another term that is widely used by socialists: proletariat.
What is the proletariat? For present purposes, the proletariat can be said to consist of the class of wage workers, but only to the extent that they are also conscious of their position in society and in history as a whole. That is, they are workers who understand their relationship to capital and to capitalism, who understand that they are being exploited, and who recognise that they must take action on their own behalf if they are to overcome their exploitation.
If this definition is correct, the proletariat are a doubly organised group. Firstly, like all wage labourers, they are organised by the capitalist businesses for which they work – organised to work in factories, mines, latifundia, bureaucracies, and so on. But secondly, they have also organised themselves, in the form of trade unions and more or less radical workers’ political parties.
One effect of this double organisation is that it protects the proletariat from the unpredictability and disorder inherent in capitalism. Workers are regularly made unemployed by capitalism’s inability to organise production in a rational manner. But although this anarchy can be disastrous for workers as employees, not least because it cuts them off from one aspect of their collective organisation, it need not disorganise the proletariat. The unemployed, though no longer organised by capital, remain part of proletarian organisations, and so part of the proletariat generally. So may individuals who are not formally employed at all, such as domestic workers, pensioners, individuals with disabilities, and full-time carers, who can have their own unions and can be members of socialist political parties.
A second effect of a self-conscious proletariat is that it is able to translate the exploitation of workers – the basis of capitalism as a whole – into collective action in the interests of workers as a whole. This can be extremely effective. At the moment the practical leadership of the proletariat is held by trade unions, their membership is largely working class and they have only a weak consciousness of their position vis à vis capitalism. Nevertheless, even these weak unions have already won countless benefits for working people – better pay, better terms and conditions, more security at work, equal opportunities, improved health and safety, a minimum wage, maximum working time, paid holidays, better maternity, paternal and carer leave, and much else.
Through this second form of organisation, the proletariat come to recognise their place under capitalism. That is still not quite the same as recognising their relation to society and history as a whole, which requires a more overtly political consciousness. Of course, many individuals who join unions or political parties do so without any very developed consciousness of their situation in the economy as a whole. However, once they are involved in organisations whose leading members have developed a degree of political consciousness, awareness of their collective plight spreads beyond those who take an active interest in economic and political analysis, triggering not only awareness of exploitation but also a desire to take action to overcome it. Workers come to realise that the perennial struggle for better pay and conditions reflects a more profound fact of systematic and then systemic exploitation. That is, they come to see that the perennial struggle with management is a constant not simply of bad employers but intrinsic to capitalism as such. By this route they come to understand that they will never be allowed to benefit from the wealth they create. Slowly, as ‘trade union’ consciousness matures into political consciousness properly so called, the proletariat comes to recognise the revolutionary changes that their liberation requires, and gives a name to their aspiration. In this way, the proletariat develop a distinct, specifically socialist consciousness.
Unfortunately, this brings us back to the problem from which we started. Even if trade unions and workers’ political parties have extracted many benefits from capitalism, this has not empowered them to run capitalism itself. Such ‘normal every day people who earn an average wage’ still haven’t become architects or strategists or even managers, and without such skills no industrial society can survive.
Hence the other half of the class equation. If the working class isn’t able to perform all the tasks that are needed to run capitalism, who can? In two words: the middle class.
3. What do the middle class do?
So what do the middle classes do? Mostly they are responsible for five large areas of society.
First and foremost, they design, build and run the capitalist system itself. These individuals – managers, accountants, consultants, ‘human resource’ specialists, and so on – make up the ‘managerial’ section of the middle class.
Secondly, they provide business with a range of technical skills, from R&D to architecture to systems development to product design to building the organisations that the previous fraction of the middle class operate.
A third component of the middle class consists of ‘the professions’ – doctors, teachers, lawyers, priests, social workers, and so on. This group (which also includes hosts of ancillary workers of more marginal class identity) mostly work in society’s ‘superstructures’.[3] That is, they are employed by social institutions such as schools, hospitals, government, and so on, that (in most industrial countries) are not businesses. Their role is primarily to create and maintain the workforce and keep it in a fit state to work.
The fourth group – broadly speaking the civil service, but at all levels – is responsible for managing the huge political infrastructure of government – local, national and international – that capitalism needs if it is to work at all. They too are largely focused on society’s superstructures, but perform different roles to the professions.
The final group of middle-class workers is employed directly by the ruling class (and others who aspire to privilege), and its purpose is to satisfy their needs. They offer professional, managerial and technical expertise through private schools, private health care, private banking and so on. Even opera singers and other practitioners of the more expensive arts can be thought of as specialists in serving the class of owners of capital and of property generally.
For reasons that will soon be made clear, it’s worth asking where all these middle-class jobs came from. Some existed long before the rise of industry, or indeed capitalism, or indeed class societies. Doctors, teachers, priests, lawyers and other professionals have probably existed in some form or another since before the rise of civilisation itself, coming into existence in the very process whereby human economies became productive enough to support specialists.
Other middle-class roles are much newer. Although science as we currently understand the word is several centuries old, it only began to play a significant role in industry – that is, being used on a large scale and offering indispensable new knowledge – towards the end of the nineteenth century. Previously the individual entrepreneur and their employees had enough skill between them (especially in connection with steam and textile production) to design and build machines and factories for themselves. But with the rise of the chemical and electrical industries especially, the sheer scale and difficulty of the underlying technologies meant that no amount of individual knowledge was enough to design and build the profoundly new means of production on which these industries were based. So entrepreneurs were obliged to look elsewhere for the necessary knowledge and support. Such expertise was provided by a new cadre of middle-class technologists, trained in universities and providing independent scientific and engineering expertise. These experts (supported by increasingly complex and extensive teams) not only created industrial systems of unparalleled power and sophistication and on an unprecedented scale but also conducted innovative research and development within corporations themselves.
But even this explains only a small fraction of the growth of the middle class. One of the key trends of twentieth century corporate structure was the recruitment of specialists to manage and perform the specifically capitalist functions once performed by entrepreneurs themselves. These include:
corporate strategy;
investment management;
organisational design;
recruitment, training and ‘human relations’;
product design;
research and development;
systems architecture, design and development;
business operations;
all aspects of day-to-day management and supervision;
sales, marketing and public relations.
And so on. In short, the middle class designs, builds and operates whatever it is businesses need to do business. And as a result of this development, and with only one critical exception, everything the individual entrepreneur used to do has been transferred to the middle classes.
These functions are performed by middle-class workers who cannot (currently) be described as ‘normal every day people who earn an average wage’. These are not working-class functions – aspects of direct production – but they are all essential to any contemporary organisation. They demand specialised skills and training, frequently beginning with years at institutions of higher education. Middle-class workers in these areas are also typically paid at rates of which working class people can scarcely dream. Indeed, even the language of working-class and middle-class payment is telling: middle-class workers are not merely ‘paid’ but ‘remunerated’ – a tell-tale name for consciously nurtured difference, designed to create the impression of a more highly valued, even pampered group of superior employees.
4. Working class versus middle class?
It is a familiar fact that the middle and working classes occupy very different parts of society – often, in the case of workplace, housing and the education system, literally different places – while the kinds of work they perform are profoundly separate. More than that, however, it is the nature of many middle-class occupations that is the main reason why working- and middle-class people seldom feel much affinity for one another. Just reading the above job descriptions makes it obvious why this is so. When the two sides do come together – as doctor and working-class patient, as teacher and working-class schoolchild, and above all as middle-class manager and working-class worker – the imbalance between the two sides is palpable. On the other hand, where both sides are occupied by members of the middle classes, the asymmetry is by no means so obvious. For example, the relationship of middle-class manager to technical expert of professional is considerably more respectful. On the other hand, as more and more technical skills are becoming commonplace (notably in IT), this respect has been substantially eroded – along with the corresponding payslips.
But this isn’t simply a matter of different jobs or class prejudice or a sense of social or cultural superiority and inferiority. In many areas, when working class and middle class meet there is real antagonism. Above all else, capitalism’ most fundamental struggle – between workers and bourgeoisie – actually presents itself as an active conflict between workers and the managerial section of the middle class.
In business, managers are essentially the instruments of the business’s owners – which is to say, of the capitalists, of the bourgeoisie. All their functions are designed to achieve the owners’ objectives: to make sure that ‘the business’ runs, but even more so to make sure that it runs profitably. It is the most basic aim of capital to generate a profit, so it is the most basic responsibility of managers to extract surplus value through the organisation. This is achieved by controlling and disciplining the working class (and some middle-class technical specialists and professionals too), either directly (as line managers) or indirectly (through their work in areas such as ‘human capital management’, recruitment, and so on). And of course, each layer of management has its own bosses, in the form of the tier of management immediately about them, which exercises the same authority and has the same objectives vis à vis lower management as the latter have over the direct producers.
Managers may not think of their roles in those terms – the great majority of managers probably have no idea what ‘surplus value’ means, and many probably seldom think of their work as being directly connected to the business’s profitability. However, to put the matter the other way around, if they didn’t make sure that the surplus value flowed into the company coffers and profits to the business, the business itself would simply fail. So whatever their individual or collective intentions or awareness, management’s work must result in this extraction of surplus value. And given that another word for extracting surplus value is ‘exploitation’, the irreducible core function of the managerial middle class is to exploit the workers. In other words, management not only require working class people to be subordinate to them, but it is they who perform directly the actual exploitation of the working class. Conversely, for this antagonism of middle- and working-class workers to be overcome, this exploitative relationship of middle to working class must be recognised as an objective fact. It is a reality of which the managerial middle class must become aware before they can transcend their destructive social role.
Nor is this antagonism simply a matter of everyday organisation, control and supervision. Here at least, management have the excuse that the nature of capitalist exploitation in the production process – the fact that the extraction of surplus value is hidden on plain sight – excuses them from noticing their predatory role. After all, it is hidden from most direct producers too. But when conflict arises, when working class employees try to negotiate for better pay and conditions and the possibility of conflict with ‘the company’ arises, and when, from the business’s point of view it is essential for the exploitation of the workers of all kinds to be re-imposed, who is it that working people actually confront? Again, it is not the company’s owners but its managers - again, the middle classes.
So the middle classes are (from their own point of view) right to reject any identity with the working class, and a fortiori ‘the proletariat’: not only do their worlds really resemble those of working-class workers very little but each side has effectively actively excluded the other by virtue of the conflict into which they are forced by the nature of capitalist exploitation.
All this can create a strong sense of hostility towards the middle classes among socialists, and understandably so. Aren’t the middle class something between allies and stooges of the ruling class? Indeed, for those who confuse the middle class with the bourgeoisie itself, aren’t the middle class the fundamental problem? To include them along with the working class among the proletariat would surely be an error of the first order.
This theoretical doubt can only be intensified by what is a justified practical antipathy. The working class have every reason to be angry with their middle-class controllers. The egoistical individualism of middle class life; the seemingly leisurely work, the warm, comfortable offices in which they work; the still more comfortable life outside the office; the extra pay and privileges, the long holidays, the share options: what have the middle class done to deserve that, when the working class faces an increasing poverty and precariousness?
And yet…
5. All together now?
As noted at the start of this essay, the middle-class are workers in any meaningful sense of the word – even the managers whose work is to ensure the exploitation of the working class. Their work is precisely as essential for production to take place as that of the working class. Furthermore, whatever their relationship to the working class, the relationship of the middle class to their employers is essentially the same as that of any other wage-labourer. After all, these are the very same owners who employ the workers their middle-class labour serves to exploit. Subtle differences between wages and salaries or the addition of special benefits, privileges and cultural nuances do not change this fundamental identity. All workers are exploited, including those who manage the system of exploitation.
Nor does the fact that certain groups of self-employed professionals or technical staff employed on temporary contracts are ‘independent’ change anything: they still have to sell their labour if they are to earn a living, and the fact that such sales are piecemeal – by the day, by the case – makes no difference. In both instances their lack of sufficient independent capital means that it is ultimately necessary to rely on their labour-power to make a living: the capital they use to do this usually still belongs to someone else. Conversely, businesses profit from the work of middle-class workers in exactly the same way as they profit from any member of the working class – by paying middle-class employees their ‘cost of production’ but taking from them the entire product that, directly or indirectly, they have created. Under normal economic circumstances and in any competently run business, that product is worth a good deal more than the cost of the (middle-class) worker.
So the relationship between working class and middle class is at least a little ambivalent. On the surface they are opposed to one another, but behind the scenes they find themselves in the same plight. Even though they do not recognise it as being the same, out of this ambivalence it may be possible to salvage a more positive connection, perhaps even an alliance.
To see how this might work, each of the middle-class functions listed above must be understood from two quite different points of view. From a technical point of view, the middle class enable and manage the organisation’s production. That is, they plan, organise and control how goods are made and services delivered. From the other point of view – from the business perspective – they manage how production leads to profits – the overall aim of the organisation, considered as a capitalist enterprise. Hence the ambiguity of every manager’s role – to make sure that work is carried out properly, but also to ensure that the company makes an acceptable return on its investments. Depending on whereabouts in the system as a whole the individual manager resides, the scope of this responsibility is greater or less and the manager’s ability to make a substantive contribution changes, but in all cases this is their function, though seldom their explicit responsibility.
Obviously these technical and business functions are not at all the same. They are only collapsed into a single job description because it’s a convenient way of operating a specifically capitalist enterprise. After all, isn’t it ‘obvious’ that that ‘running the business’ and ‘getting the most out of the workers’ are (more or less) the same thing? Yet in reality these are by no means identical. Production can happen entirely without the demand for a profit. In a different kind of organisation producing the same goods and services – a socialist cooperative, for example – technical activities such as planning and coordination would still be needed and one might still have a manager to carry them out.
However, the elements of hierarchy and authority on which exploitation, and therefore profit, rely could easily be dispensed with in favour of collective decisions on what to produce, cooperation organisation of the production process, and a democratic distribution of the results. Any surplus over and above what was needed to ensure the simple reproduction of society – that is, the surplus product that, in a capitalist business, is converted into profit – could just as easily be shared by all the workers, or distributed more widely across society as a whole, or used collectively to achieve democratically agreed goals. Which of these options is chosen – or something completely different – would depend solely on a democratic decision by all the producers and the wider society. Conversely, it is only from the capitalist perspective that the middle-class manager’s work is – and must be – exploitative. Eliminate the system on which ‘the business’ rests – which is to say, abolish capitalism – and what remains is a collection of purely technical tasks – managerial and otherwise – that might well be needed under any economic system.
In the meantime, the negative side of the relationship between middle-class and working-class – the mutual hostility of exploiters and exploited – is quickly becoming the same for both sides. During the quarter-century from 1980 to 2005, many businesses’ internal activity was dominated by a corporate determination to nail down exactly how work was to be done. This was the era of ‘process engineering’ and the ‘quality revolution’, when the special skills of (among others) management and their middle-class co-workers such as architects, accountants and product designers were mapped out, analysed and recreated in bureaucratic form, or perhaps completely automated, or even abolished. As much as possible, key skills were analysed, rationalised, standardised, and, wherever possible, eliminated, reduced to commodity labour or transcribed into computer programs, databases and communication networks. The net effect was to reduce the historic status of much of the middle class to little more than yet another area of skilled labour, and not a particularly skilled at that. Even where expert managers continued to play an important role, their work was subordinated to formal processes, documented procedures, templates, step-by-step methods and techniques, standardised tools, and so on – all a step closer to their eventual subordination to a machine.
So from a ‘business’ point of view, the difference between working-class and middle-class work is still based on their different relationships to ‘the system’: the working class as direct producers within the capitalist system, the middle class as the creators and enforcers of professional, technical, managerial and business aspects of that system. But just as previous cycles of mechanisation hollowed out working-class skills, leaving a deskilled machine-minders on one side and new strata of machine-tool makers and control-system engineers on the other, so now the middle class was being hollowed out, leaving deskilled clerical workers at the bottom and a new sector of consultants and specialists in planning, resourcing, data modelling, quality management and so on at the top. Taken together, the absolute growth in the numbers of relatively unskilled clerical workers combined with the relatively limited number of remaining managers properly so called had the net effect of reducing the relative value of management as a skill, even while expanding the scale of operations that can be effectively managed. In short, ‘management’ grew and became more sophisticated, but the managers have been reduced in the process, largely replaced by new technical and organisational forces of production, and fixed capital generally. With that, much of the middle class’s claim to superior salaries and special treatment has been eroded, and more and more the lot of the erstwhile middle classes has come to resemble that of the working class.
Nor is this fate limited to the sections of the middle class specialising in managing businesses. Much the same has happened to the professions. For decades after the Second World War, most lawyers (at least in the UK) were self-employed and either ran their own private practices or were partners in small, self-sufficient firms. Over the last few decades, however, many lawyers have been recruited by large law firms such as the so-called ‘Magic Circle‘ of London’s leading legal practices. There, despite the fact that there is nominally a route to partnership (which is to say, part-ownership in the firm), the great majority of lawyers are actually employees.[4] What is more, in 2023, a survey of American law firms found that, for every new partner, 4 new lawyers were employed. Plainly, few will make it to the top.
How has this happened? The global concentration of capitalism as a whole, with enormous new corporations spanning the globe, has required law firms to likewise have a global reach. This has led to the massive expansion of individual firms and made their employment of thousands of lawyers unavoidable. Huge numbers of lawyers have also been recruited directly by business and government, while the Big Four accountancy firms, in their striving to become general-purpose business support organisations, now also employ thousands of lawyers, in some cases more than the largest law firms.
In other words, though in terms of their technical work as lawyers they are no less middle-class than they used to be, most lawyers are being driven from independence to employment. That is, they have moved from owning their own practice to being employed by someone else. In that respect at least, this moves them much closer to working-class workers. As Karl Marx put it:
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers.[5]
True, it’s still not possible for lawyers to carry out their work in the crude conditions under which working-class labour has always been performed. The different demands of mental as opposed to manual labour still mean that legal offices are warm, clean and a lot more tranquil than the average factory, or indeed the average clerical office. So lawyers still avoid the pressures and degradation to which working class workers are routinely subjected. All the same, on 14 March 2022, 94% of the members of the Criminal Bar Association of England and Wales voted to go on strike.
None of this happened out of the blue. It is decades since the first open-plan office made general surveillance of middle-class employees the norm. Computerisation has long since degraded middle-class autonomy and skills. At the same time, the general rise in educational standards has thrust the children of the middle classes into direct competition with what were previously their working-class inferiors.
The result is obvious, not least in terms of middle-class pay. A traditional middle-class income used to allow its earner to:
buy their own home;
have a significant ‘discretionary’ income available for at least a few luxuries;
manage most emergencies;
be creditworthy;
sustain their children’s claim to a middle-class future through private schools and college education,[6] and
accumulate enough savings for a comfortable retirement.
Middle-class incomes were also consistently more secure, and tracked the overall growth in the economy as a whole. But even the OECD acknowledges that this is not longer true. Middle-class incomes are shrinking relative to the economy as a whole, with increasingly many falling into lower income groups.[7] At the same time, middle-class workers are finding themselves subject to the pressures and precariousness the working class has had to endure throughout its history. So, in January 2022 almost half of all Americans who earned more than $100,000 per year nevertheless reported living paycheck to paycheck,[8] while the average level of US household debt in 2022 was $101,915 – and increase of nearly 10% over 2020.
All in all, and despite the fact that they continue to be the agents of the capitalist class and responsible for the direct exploitation of workers of all classes, more and more the conditions on which the middle class are employed resemble those of the working class.
And as they do so, the middle class find themselves increasingly separated from the ruling class with which they once confidently identified. Far from being the respected professionals in comfortable private offices who dominated the post-War world, most forms of middle-class work are mere salaried employment now, performed by masses of interchangeable middle-class individuals in bland open-plan offices, who are no longer obviously allies of the group on whose behalf the system as a whole operates – the owners. Conversely, by being reduced to mere employees, they become able to identify with the position of the working class, even to the point where – as demonstrated in 2022 – British lawyers join striking railway workers on their picket lines!
If this long historical process signals the progressive slide of the middle classes towards the working class, what does it signify for the working class? Long before the middle class found itself being hollowed out by successive waves of technology and enormously expanded concentrations of capital, the labour required for the direct production of goods and services was already undergoing repeated cycles of much the same kind. Each new wave of industrial and then office technology eliminated or deskilled wide swathes of the previous skilled working-class, even while preparing a relative few for a new echelon of work to be performed by a new working class equipped with new, more sophisticated skills.
What is more, especially in the twentieth century, waves of deskilling and redundancy were only possible because new strata of skilled workers were created. Not only did each wave of fixed capital presuppose and then expand a new wave of specialised technicians – to build, supervise and maintain the new machines – but this new working class – now equipped with literacy, numeracy and organisational skills – also took over much of the white-collar work needed to administer the larger and more sophisticated enterprises to which the growth and concentration of capital also led. Both these tendencies raised the level of attainment of working-class workers, moved them to more humane work environments, organised them in new ways, and raised their expectations of life.
In other words, the early decades of industry – up until the mid-nineteenth century – were characterised mainly by deskilling of the working class, by labour substitution, brutal discipline and mass impoverishment, culminating in the living standards of the industrial working class in cities like Manchester and Berlin falling to quite possibly the lowest level of anyone in human history. Thereafter, however, the accumulation of fixed capital in the form of more powerful, more extensive, more complex and more integrated machinery enhanced their skills. It also moved many into white-collar employment.[9] For the same accumulation and concentration of capital also created a new world of office work, which demanded new skills and methods of organisation. These included not only mastery of the telegraph and then the telephone, the typewriter, the calculator and much else, but also learning to navigate and comprehend a rapidly evolving universe of literacy and numeracy, formal roles and responsibilities, filing systems, rigorous procedures, and industrial bureaucracy. This not only introduced a new range of social, intellectual and practical skills and experience but also brought clerical workers – the working class of industrial administration – into unprecedentedly proximity with their middle-class ‘betters’. Having ceased to be the direct producers of physical commodities, this new clerical working class became instead the direct producers of the information and decisions on which large-scale industry entirely depended.
True, the speed and facility with which the public education system responded to this and similar historical challenges by providing clerical skills a century ago and computing skills now meant that, despite the meteoric rise in demand, working-class labour was quickly devalued by a combination of excessive supply of workers and their low cost of production. Mass educational provision had effectively redefined ‘unskilled’ labour to include abilities few workers could have imagined, still less commanded, only a few decades before. Furthermore, this demand for more sophisticated working-class labour paralleled the continuing expansion and concentration of capital, so the levels of education and skill required of both industrial workers and clerical staff continued to rise, as does the sophistication of their organisation. True, the army of clerical specialists that came to prominence in the mid-twentieth century has been largely replaced by word processors, spreadsheets and other software, but the clerical workers themselves have evolved into either more skilled administrators or service personnel. And of course, in the more advanced societies the services that rely on their efforts have long since superseded the production of goods as the heart of the economy as a whole.[10]
What all this amounts to is, of course, the so-called ‘civilising mission’ of capitalism. Capitalism develops society, despite itself, and despite the fact that capital’s only relationship to society as a whole is to exploit it. Yet civilisation happens because, for a highly developed industrial capitalism to operate at all, more and more workers need higher education, civilised working and living conditions, a broadened perspective and a heightened understanding of the society in which each capitalist enterprise operates. This leads workers to greater awareness not only of their own position in relation to capital – one of exploitation – but also of the structure of capitalism itself. On the other hand, the realisation that workers are becoming too organised, too aware and strong for outright repression, combined with genuine liberal and conservative humanism, persuaded even the Bismarcks and the Francos that a degree of social provision was unavoidable if the social, political and economic status quo was to be preserved.
6. Class competition or class alliance?
So as capitalism unfolds, middle and working classes converge, not on a single point but into a general economic system of overlapping labour forms, content and operating relationships. The distinction between direct and indirect production is submerged in a sea of fixed capital and the social differences between working class and middle class narrow. Where there was once a clear opposition of mental and manual labour and their associated classes and cultures, now there are globe-spanning chains of products and services, of complex tasks and interrelated responsibilities. At the same time, the internal organisation of businesses that are jointly run by the descendants of a distinct professional-technical middle class and an increasingly skilled working class is likely to resemble less the bureaucratic hierarchies of specialists of traditional industrial organisations than the agile forms towards which professional and technical organisations of all kinds are increasingly migrating.
In short, from a technical point of view, the boundaries between the historically different (and opposed) classes of workers’ respective worlds are being erased, to be replaced not by an undifferentiated mass but by a complex totality of interrelated roles and responsibilities. The previously localised hierarchical structures controlling the relations between successive tasks are replaced by or subordinated to trans-organisational chains in which specialists and generalists of all kinds interact, if not directly or as formal equals then certainly as objectively dependent on one another to perform any of their roles and realise any of their corporate functions.
Eventually the only remaining obstacle to their unity – in fact if not in their individual consciousnesses – will be their conflicting roles in the capitalist business – which is to say, as exploiters and exploited. However, exactly how such relations of exploitation are to be sustained when they are constantly being undermined and often overtly contradicted by the technical requirements of the system as a whole is not clear – or at least, not in terms that are compatible with capitalist relations of production. On the other hand, that such positions should persist is essential if the system as a whole is to remain capitalist. But at the same time, it is only the persistence of capitalism that requires this relationship to go on. By contrast, the requirements of these developed technical relations of production can only be sustained where the business relations of production are overthrown. Ergo…
So perhaps progressive unification of working and middle classes is part (only a part) of the growing contradiction between the forces and relations of production that engenders revolution: the conflict between the objective organisational needs of the emerging economic system and the need for hierarchy to enforce exploitation. And perhaps, out of that convergence of organisations and clash between the forces and relations of production it demands, and with it the unification of all the groups who actually run industrial societies in opposition to its current ownership, a fully organised, fully conscious proletariat will arise. After all, none of the essential features of a proletariat are lacking:
They include all direct and indirect producers of actual products.
They produce all value within the economic system as a whole.
They are in effective control of the forces of production.
They have established an awareness of their unity as a group, their relationship to the forces of production, their relationship to those who control (e.g., own) the forces of production and a political consciousness of their own need for emancipation.
7. What about the board of directors?
All of which is to ignore the people who currently control the capitalist corporation, define its goals, set its strategy and determine (in general terms) how it works: the ‘C-level’ executives (CEO, CFO, COO, and so on) situated at the pinnacle of the corporate pyramid.
Historically speaking, this group can be described as successors to the archetype of industrial capitalism as a whole, the Victorian entrepreneur. And, like the Victorian entrepreneur, they continue to direct the enormous structure at whose apex they sit in whatever direction they believe to be in the best interests of the owners.[11] It is perfectly true that the classic Victorian entrepreneur often personally embodied the capital, vision, strategy, organisation, technical expertise, architecture, product concepts and detailed design, not to mention detailed technical skills such as machine-building and general innovation on which their company’s success depended. Often they were the only individuals who knew how to get things done, or had the resources to get things moving. Certainly ‘the workers’ didn’t, lacking as they did both the know-how and the resources (i.e., the money).
However, the simple fact is, almost everything the classical Victorian proprietor needed to do for themselves, and which the modern corporate organisation presents as being the work of its directors, is now done by paid employees. True, directors set overall targets, make strategic decisions and authorise and monitor investments and expenditure, and so on, but as far as corporations of any size are concerned, actually exercising this executive authority is typically based on information and analysis provided by specialised employees, and communication and decision-making lower down the hierarchy. And true, their responsibilities require considerable skill. However, there is no compelling reason why the same skills should not be acquired and exercised by an employee. In fact, the only reason these responsibilities fall to the company directors is because they are appointed by the shareholders – i.e., the company’s owners. The decisions made by company directors could just as easily be designed to further purposes agreed democratically by the company’s employees: there is no magic or virtue in the fact that the directors serve shareholders rather than employees, users and customers or the population at large.
Nor have these new specialists – administrators, analysts, accountants, architects, investment teams, business strategists, and so on – on whose skill and effort the corporation now relies been deployed as simply a cheaper alternative to the directors performing these tasks for themselves. These are not roles modern ‘executives’ could perform for themselves but are too trivial for them to waste their time on. The incomprehensibly complex and sophisticated nature of the modern industrial organisation is completely beyond the grasp of any single individual such as the classic entrepreneur or even an entire board of directors. The technical refinement and organisational complexity of many of the tasks required to generate a basic status report is beyond the grasp of many of those who occupy seats on the board, yet who rely entirely upon the quality, timeliness and reliability of the information such reports contain. The idea that other, far more complicated tasks could be performed by the board is surreal.
In other words, it is not as though this extraordinary transformation of the personal company into an corporate organisation that can only operate as a comprehensively social system was the legacy of the company’s directors or their entrepreneurial predecessors. On the contrary, just as investment in the modern corporation is derived from previous cycles of surplus value extraction rather than from ‘primitive accumulation’ or the injection of independent sources of wealth, so everything about the corporation as it now stands was created by previous generations of employees. All the board of any substantial company now does personally is to manage the rights and interests of the owners, and ensure the extraction of surplus value and its distribution to the company’s investors, its creditors and to themselves.
Thus the role of the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) is to set corporate goals and ensure that the corporate strategy will meet them. The key instrument of this strategy – the money – is likewise the responsibility of the Chief Finance Officer (CFO). If there are any clear-cut villains in the exploitation of middle and working class alike, it is these two, whose functions are as close as possible to the corporation’s business interests. But of course, strategy and investment as such would still be needed by an organisation even if it were entirely under its workers’ control. So the socialist solution to all this is unlikely to be as simple as abolishing the board of directors outright (though the shareholders definitely have to go). Just as many of the functions of the state will likely endure after the political instrument of the bourgeoisie has withered away, so the high-level technical functions directors now perform may well survive the advent of socialism.
Indeed, relieved of the narrowing and distortion they undergo in conditions of capitalist economics – which is to say, when performing their specifically business functions – such roles may emerge from the ugly chrysalis of the capitalist corporation and take on a genuinely social form. So some functions currently performed by C-level executives may be needed in a socialist organisation, and at least some of the corresponding systems and processes may be salvageable. However, there would also be fundamental differences. To pluck out only the most obvious:
These ‘executive’ offices would be democratically elected and supervised by all members of the organisation. The only reason this is not presently possible is that the purpose of the board simply isn’t to further the technical purposes of ‘the organisation’ – that is, to make useful goods and services. On the contrary, the work of members of the organisation with technical knowledge is of only secondary significance, because the technical side of the organisation is only a means to its business ends, which is to say, to profit. This is also why executives are not responsible for the interests of the people who do the actual work or the organisation’s customers and users. Rather, they are answerable solely to the organisation’s owners. Eliminate the latter, and with it the profit motive, and a democratic alternative immediately becomes both visible and viable.
As the ‘agile’ revolution of the last decade or two has demonstrated, it is possible to carry out large-scale operations without needing a bureaucratic hierarchy of specialists, which is a key means by which capitalism organises the domination of the many by the few. On the contrary, a radically democratic structure seems to emerge naturally in agile organisations. A massively flattened and democratised organisation would have to learn new ways of working, but that should be no more of a problem than the creation of the original corporation, which also constituted a comprehensive revolution in how work was managed and performed.
This is not however a state of affairs that can be realistically applied to individual organisations The historical evidence from cases like the Lucas Plan and thousands of cooperatives worldwide makes it clear that control by workers in place of boards of directors is viable even in a capitalist environment. Spain’s Mondragon[12] cooperative currently has more than 81,000 members organised into 96 self-governing cooperatives and 14 research and development centres, and makes up one of the country’s largest business groups. On the other hand, a capitalist environment is not only competitive (not necessarily a problem for a cooperative) but also directly hostile to socialised organisations of all kinds. As a result, while capitalism continues to dominate the economic environment, accommodations, sometimes quite brutal, are unavoidable. As Noam Chomsky said of Mondragon:
It’s worker owned, it’s not worker managed, although the management does come from the workforce often, but it’s in a market system and they still exploit workers in South America, and they do things that are harmful to the society as a whole and they have no choice. If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to survive, you are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.[13]
So cooperatives founded under capitalist conditions, though they may foreshadow a future socialist world in certain limited ways, cannot be any more than stepping stones to a socialist economy and society. Still, they make it clear that capitalism itself is not inescapable.
8. The nature of proletarian control
The rule of the proletariat has nothing in common with the rule of a Vandal-like barbarism; on the contrary, the proletariat is the only class which is in a position to step into the entire legacy of the bourgeoisie, since its own welfare depends on the continued development of this legacy. It is the last class that will exercise rule, for with the abolition of all class privileges all remaining classes will dissolve into it, just as even now it absorbs all creative elements of the other classes who have achieved a theoretical understanding of the historical movement. With the rule of the proletariat there comes to an end every political rule whatsoever, for the basis of such rule is the class struggle.
Joseph Weydemeyer, ‘The dictatorship of the proletariat’[14]
The proletariat taking control of the forces of production would transform the nature of society as a whole. However, it would be mistaken to try to predict exactly how the world would be different then. Revolution by definition changes the terms of social life, so what is possible, what is necessary and what remains a matter of contingent choice and action is fundamentally different from what they were before such predictions came into existence. Mikhail Bakunin was perhaps being hyperbolic, but he was not wrong when he claimed that ‘Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary’. So instead of predictions, Marx sets out a very simple presupposition for socialism. This is that socialism will be characterised by collective property.[15] This is by no means the only necessary characteristic of socialism, of course, but it is one that makes an especially stark contrast with the capitalist status quo.
So how would collective property change the world?
Any reference to ‘property’ in the context of a capitalist society is easy to misinterpret, especially by inadvertently carrying bourgeois notions of property into a better future. There are, in general, three basic social relations of production that, taken together with the prevailing forces of production, define a mode of production. Of these, the first is the relation that determines who controls the means of production. In the capitalist world the answer is generally that the capitalist class exercises its authority (i.e., its socially legitimate power) over the means of production through the personal and private ownership of capital. Personal ownership is often obscured by the fact that direct ownership of many forces of production is in corporate hands – not only individual businesses but also, yet more indirectly, via asset managers, investment banks, family trusts, pension funds, insurance companies, and so on. But ultimately even these faceless institutions are owned by real human beings – the so-called ‘beneficial owners’.
Leaving aside the question of the very large forces of production under the control of the state and other superstructural organisations,[16] the upshot of this system of private ownership is that bourgeois property tends to defeat all attempts to exercise social control. This is for two fundamental reasons.
Firstly, private property is exclusive to the individual, and only open to social interference or even regulation in the most extreme circumstances – so much so that in some jurisdictions the privacy of private property is a constitutional right. As John Adams – Founding Father, co-author of the Declaration of Independence and an important influence over the US Constitution – put it:
If all were to be decided by a vote of the majority, the eight or nine millions who have no property, would not think of usurping over the rights of the one or two millions who have?... Debts would be abolished first; taxes laid heavy on the rich, and not at all on the others; and at last a downright equal division of every thing be demanded, and voted… The moment the idea is admitted into society, that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence. If ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, before it can be civilized or made free.[17]
But Adams was writing in 1787, in the pre-industrial era when the principal alternative to bourgeois property was the arbitrary, anti-democratic power of monarchy and, in Europe, various forms of residual feudal authority. In that context, the sanctity of personal and private property was a valuable advance in human liberty. In the mature industrial period, however, when ‘private property’ consists of the means to dominate huge swathes of one’s fellow citizens, its effects can be catastrophic and it is essential to the viability not only of society but of nature that it be under democratic control.
Secondly, the rights of ownership that are guaranteed by private property are completely dissociated from practical participation in productive activity. Not only does the owner of capital play no direct role in production (at least, not by virtue of that ownership) but the fact that all surplus value accrues to the owners of capital in the form of profits, rent and interest ensures that they grow wealthy without any effort at all. They benefit from the immense productivity of capitalism by virtue of a relation to capital that is specifically unproductive.
So under capitalist relations of production, ownership is signified not by active involvement in for production, but rather by share certificates, deeds of property and legal contracts of different kinds. Like all other products of capitalism, shares, bonds and the like are commodities, and as such defined by the absence of any but the most external possible relationship to the thing owned. They are bought and sold, neither purchase nor sale creating any but the most formal relationship to the objects of this activity – companies, materials, machines, products, organisations, and so on. In short, private property in the means of capitalist production is the alter ego not of effort, skill, collaboration and responsibility – and absolutely not of a vision or aspiration for one’s fellow human beings – but of money. Its abiding aim is not the enrichment of producers or humanity generally but the preservation of an alien world of wealth, comfort and indulgence belonging exclusively to the few. This world is fundamentally dissociated from society as a whole, yet it is the hub around which that world orbits and to whose gravitational pull it is subordinated. Such formal instruments of ownership are not necessary for property as such – there was no need for share certificates in the early agricultural commune, where communal property prevailed – but only where there is no obvious reason why those who own should be the owners – as opposed to those who actually create and work the forces of production. Under capital, of course, they are excluded from their own natural right of ownership by their alienation from the means of production and by this precedence of formality over substance.
However, every aspect of ‘ownership’ would be abolished as soon as the proletariat recognised that, in practice and in substance, if not yet in terms of conventional wisdom or legal right, they already control the means of production. in particular, the right to buy and sell the company – the essential right of private property, of course – would disappear. No one would own the organisation in that sense – not even its workers. Individuals entering the organisation would acquire democratic rights over its decision-making, and individuals leaving would lose them. And this democratic right would itself reflect the active participation in the organisation – in a word, the organisation would not operate correctly or effectively without that individual’s efforts, so their withdrawal of the same effort would require that their views be attended to. This is of course the non-alienated form of the strike: the workers withdraw their labour when they are dissatisfied with the organisation’s operations. In the case of the capitalist corporation, this withdrawal creates an antithesis with management; in a socialist economy, it would merely represent a momentary pause while the relevant issues were disputed and agreed. So ‘ownership’ in any bourgeois sense would be dissolved along with capitalism as a whole.
Conversely, the historical defence of the bourgeoisie, the notion that there is an intrinsic legitimacy to their ownership of and authority over the forces and relations of production, collapses as soon as the proletariat recognises that it is they, and not the owners or their representatives, who create everything they have always been told that the bourgeoisie contributes to capitalism – strategy, investment, direction, and the rest, all flowing magically from the ineffable genius of the so-called ‘wealth creator’. Now, thanks to the development of capitalism itself, it is the proletariat who devise, implement and supervise the strategies, investment plans and work programmes on which all production rests, and who conceive the need for, design, build and operate the mass of fixed capital – machines, organisation, knowledge – that has for so long threatened their livelihoods. In every respect except for formal legal right, capital belongs to them, not to the capitalist.
Of course, we have been here before. This recognition that employers are not in reality the uniquely competent ‘wealth creators’, but rather primarily the representatives of private property (with perhaps a few useful skills attached), is I think analogous to the change that overtook the class of British domestic servants before and after the First World War. That is, amidst the rise of an organised working class generally and a long rearguard action by successive British governments, domestic servants came to see themselves not so much as owing service to middle- and upper-class masters as being merely employed by them, with all the differences in attitude, practical options, life-chances and so on that followed.[18] So the servant class went from a quasi-feudal relationship to their superiors to a properly bourgeois relation to their formal equals.
Of course, the entire subsequent history of working and middle classes alike has consisted of discovering that this formal equality, though by no means a falsehood, was something of a trick. They continue to be exploited, now without the cover of this sense of duty, but still needing to penetrate the smokescreen of surplus value. Nevertheless, as an emerging proletariat discovers its own strengths and recognises its own accomplishments, they come to see themselves not as merely subordinate employees but as the true creators of society’s wealth, and therefore as fully and uniquely entitled to appropriate what they have created. The remaining step – the actual act of appropriation – remains to be executed.
But before that can happen, above all the proletariat must realise that the abstract forms of capital – essentially, the money and forms of fictitious capital[19] such as shares – on which capitalists previously rested their claim to control (i.e., via share ownership, by ‘investing’ in the corporation, by buying up corporate bonds, and so on) are in fact only rights to the surplus value created by the proletariat’s own efforts in previous cycles of production. The capitalist has capital to invest only because they previously took the surplus value created by the joint efforts of the working and middle classes in the previous cycles of production and sale. That is what capitalism is: a system for funnelling the accomplishments of one class into the bank accounts of another.
But of course, this realisation cannot come about until the proletariat are and know themselves to be one class, and therefore not before there is a proletariat. For that to happen, the whole range of producers, direct and indirect, working-class and middle-class, must be organised into a single echelon that is capable to recognising not only its own nature but also its own position vis à vis the world of property from which it has previously been firmly excluded. Armed with this new understanding, capitalist ownership is revealed to be a fiction, so to speak, from which the real wealth creators – the direct and indirect producers of value – now liberate themselves by appropriating for themselves the real capital this fictitious capital camouflages.
This is why the proletariat will carry out their revolution not from outside – as have perhaps all previous revolutionaries – but from within. In practical terms, the machines, the organisations, the materials, the expertise, the supply chains, the systems of energy, communication and transport, the shops and supermarkets are all already theirs – their creations and at their practical, day-t-day disposal – and wait only for the proletariat to recognise this fact in conscious theory, so to speak, and so take full control of them. With that, the division of labour that for so long summoned classes into existence and set them at each other’s throats is subsumed by, on the one hand, a mass of fixed capital that instantiates humanity’s most essential capabilities and highest technical achievements, but in a form that is only sustainable by collective production; and, on the other, a shared consciousness that human society is a unified totality in which all have an equal interest and to which all make an equivalent contribution (i.e., the contribution of which they are capable).
On the other hand, the direct control the proletariat exercise, through their personal experience of production as a collective endeavour binding production into a rational totality, means that it is no longer necessary, or even realistically possible, to partition ownership of the economic whole into billions of lots (shares) through which private control can be exercised and profit extracted. It is the machines they direct together, based on plans drawn up together as to what they collectively decide to make, that constitute a socialist economy. With that the panoply of superstructures on which class society depends dissolves – not because all dilemmas have magically disappeared from life or there is no further need for special-purpose vehicles but because they are confronted by human beings finally unified in their most fundamental interests, and no longer in need of a web of fragmented and mutually opposed institutions through which to mediate the once-ceaseless conflict and misunderstanding.[20]
With that:
Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into the museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.[21]
With that, the great division of the economic – the social production of goods and services – from the rest of society that has plagued humanity for so many millennia ceases. In its place comes the freedom of unalienated, collective creation of the world we want and need. Thus, in Engels’ familiar words, ‘The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things’. But at least as important is are the words that immediately follow: ‘and by the conduct of processes of production’.[22] In other words – and here it is impossible to overstate the importance of this second phrase – the ‘collective property’ of the proletariat consists not of formal certificates of socially constructed rights that are separate from real production, but rather the forces of production themselves, and the reality of all members of society participating actively in production.
With that the whole notion of property dissolves: in place of rights and privileges, of subordination and exploitation, ‘the economy’ resolves itself into nothing more than the machines before our very eyes, which we design and make and we organise ourselves to use, based on the scientific insight, collective imagination and democratic decisions we have created. Thus, the proletariat supersede the bourgeoisie because they realise that, thanks to the self-development of capitalism as a whole, that is already how the world works: the proletariat already control the means of production, while the relations of production of private ownership and employment are unsustainable.
If a more philosophical justification is required than the material demands of the real world, it is suitably ironic that the key argument an organised and self-conscious proletariat advances to justify their seizure of the corporation could well be the very argument bourgeois colonists applied to the lands they stole from their existing inhabitants. They argued that indigenous peoples weren’t making the most of their lands, and that therefore people who would exploit the land more fully – the European bourgeoisie – were entitled to seize them.
Land that is left wholly to nature, that hath no improvement of pasturage, tillage, or planting, is called, as indeed it is, waste; and we shall find the benefit of it amount to little more than nothing.[23]
However, just as the lands colonialists found were being wasted – vacuum domicilium, untilled, uncultivated, unenclosed – so now the bourgeoisie are laying waste to the entire world. The bourgeoisie’s ownership of the means of production not only limits the social value that can be derived from them but also channels them into overwhelmingly destructive pathways. The capitalist imperatives of endless expansion and profit are destroying the planet, the capitalist economy is annihilating the human ecology, and the structure of capitalism means that this destruction cannot be halted while capitalism predominates – above all private property in the means of production. So the proletariat are not only entitled to take over the means of production that define industrial society but, like the bourgeoisie before them (and with a considerably better grasp of logic), they have a natural right and obligation to do so – assuming, that is, that they really are able to do make better use of them.
But the precise rationale for socialism hardly matters – it is after all not for present theorists to dictate tactics to future revolutionaries.
Conclusions
The issues raised in the course of the Twitter exchange from which this whole argument began are by no means all that needs to be said to explain and justify socialism. But as far as class is concerned, I hope this essay leads the reader to some simple, direct conclusions.
If capitalism itself tends to resolve the technical conflict between working-class and middle-class elements of proletariat, it cannot undo the business conflict – namely the middle class’s role in exploiting its fellow workers – without ceasing to be capitalism. The antipathy will remain, possibly until the very end.
Nevertheless, increasingly the middle class has more in common with the working class than with the ruling class, and is likely to resort to working-class tactics such as unionisation and strikes to defend itself. Many middle-class workers already understand the similarities between their position and that of the working class (and vice versa), and we can only expect this identification to intensify as capitalism continues to transform both.
So a fundamental strand of future socialist strategy needs to recognise this situation, to develop socialist theory and ideology to embrace this fact, and to get the middle class on board. In particular, the left needs to persuade the less conscious elements of the middle classes that they are just as exploited as the working class, that they are rapidly becoming just another element of a proletariat, and that they are natural allies of the working class.
At the same time, the left needs to develop a collective consciousness and a political strategy that weaponises the fact that, between them, the middle and working classes already control the means of production. All that the bourgeoisie do now is own capital, and ownership of the means of production is no longer a meaningful social function once these essential and fundamentally revolutionary facts have been recognised.
References
For all bibliographic references, click here.
Notes
[1] Marx and Engels (2010: Vol. 49, 152 [Letter from Engels to Max Oppenheim, 24 March 1891]).
[2] In fact millions work who are neither working- nor middle-class, at least not in terms of occupation. I am consciously leaving out the millions who make society possible by doing the enormous mass of reproductive labour that makes up domestic work, childcare, caring for the sick, disabled and elderly in the home, charity work, and so on. These individuals and groups certainly fall under the rubric of ‘workers’, and include the workers who directly produce the central commodity of capitalism as a whole, namely labour-power. However, the theoretical complications created by their superficially ‘non-economic’ functions, informal status and indirect connection to any form of social or economic valuation would make the argument set out here much more complicated without adding much to the point it is trying to make.
[3] On base and superstructure and the rise of the middle class, see Robinson (2023).
[4] Gotch (2022).
[5] Marx and Engels (2010: Vol. 6, 487 [Manifesto of the Communist Party]).
[6] For the advantages, costs and class participation in private education in the UK, see Green (2022).
[7] OECD (2019).
[8] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/48-percent-of-americans-with-annual-incomes-over-100-000-live-paycheck-to-paycheck-9-percentage-points-higher-than-first-reported-in-june-2021--301494770.html.
[9] Goldin and Katz (1998).
[10] Frey and Osborne (2015).
[11] Or at least such is the theory. There remains the ‘principle-agent’ problem, which begins from the fact that it is executive management, and not shareholders, who have practical authority over the corporation; that these executives have the authority to interpret the shareholders interests and even their explicitly stated wishes (as defined by motions passed at shareholders’ meetings); that these executives also have their own interests; that these interests are not identical with those of the owners; and that therefore they may guide the corporation in directions that suit themselves more than their employers. However, it would be difficult to sustain this position indefinitely – executives, unlike owners, can be fired – and in any case neither the owners nor their agents have any interest in their employees except to exploit them: in that respect their points of view are so close to identical as to make any differences between them negligible. The ‘principle-agent problem’ represents at most an additional conflict within the ruling class, without in any way affecting the underlying problem.
[12] Whyte and Whyte (1991).
[13] Quoted in Flanders (2012).
[14] Weydemeyer (1852).
[15] See, for example, Marx and Engels (2010: Vol. 24, 346-369 [Drafts of the letter to Vera Zasulich, 8 March 1881]).
[16] Robinson (2023).
[17] https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s15.html.
[18] The relevant social and political history is summarised in Todd (2014: Ch. 1).
[19] Marx (1974: Ch. 25).
[20] Robinson (2023).
[21] Marx and Engels (2010: Vol. 26, 272 [Origin of the Family, Private Property and State]).
[22] Marx and Engels (2010: Vol. 25, 268 [Anti-Dühring]).
[23] Locke (2003: §42). Locke might be more sympathetic to the present argument than one might imagine, given that he held to the labour theory of value, although he adhered to a narrow definition of labour as essentially agricultural (Arneil 1996: 102).