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L. Schwartz
Class!
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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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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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.1
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;
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2
David Cannadine, Class in Britain (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p.4.
Ibid., p.20.
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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 18th 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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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.
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael
Joseph, 1994), pp.303-4.
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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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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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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 19th and early 20th 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
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9
Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914, pp.180-4.
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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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
CANNADINE, DAVID, Class in Britain (London: Penguin Books, 2000).
HOBSBAWM, ERIC, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1987).
---, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael
Joseph, 1994).
JORDANOVA, LUDMILLA, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000).
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