Britain: Is the working class back?
First published at New Socialist.
As the welfare state wobbled in the late 1970s, the spectres of rapid deindustrialisation, automation and the parallel explosion of white-collar service work led Andre Gorz to do the unthinkable and question the historic role of the proletariat as the revolutionary subject, the historic force that would bring a new socialist society into being. Shortly after Gorz published Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, in 1982, Reagan and Thatcher attacked — and then crushed — the most militant sections of the organised labour movement.
Following the destruction of the union movement and the open abandonment of the working class by their traditional political representatives, the working class disappeared from the political scene by (largely) ceasing to vote — in the 2024 General Election, fewer than 50% of working class adults voted, 1 leading to an enormous gulf or ‘void’ between the people on the one hand and ‘politics’ on the other. This void, as Peter Mair argues, is constituted by political parties becoming detached from wider society and their traditional bases. “The age,” he writes, “of party democracy has passed”.2
As the working class exited stage left, a new subject came to take their place. To the extent that ‘politics’ involves any actual engagement with ordinary people outside a technocratic elite, it has been the middle or intermediate classes, not the working classes, who have driven both establishment and insurgent politics since the nineties. Labour’s landslide victory in 1997 had little to do with working class power, but was substantially the result of Tony Blair having won over the lower middle class voters who previously had been the bedrock of Thatcherism.3 Corbynism (like Syriza and Podemos) was, at least in its activist core, the political movement of the younger new petty bourgeoisie.4
The last fifty or so years have arguably been the lowest point for working class struggle and class consciousness since the Industrial Revolution. Gorz’s heretical hypothesis had, until recently, seemed to have been vindicated: the forward march of labour, the inevitable rise of the proletariat, had ground to a halt. Yet class struggle ebbs and flows. As the late, great Mike Davis reminds us, capitalism’s cyclical crises periodically opens (although it can also close off) the possibilities for proletarian advance.5 Organised labour responded belatedly to the interlocking crises of contemporary capital, culminating, in 2022, in the biggest wave of strikes in Britain for 30 years. This period of sustained and coordinated industrial action was itself a significant achievement given the severity of Britain’s anti-union laws and given the traditionally craven and partisan attitudes of the British trade union bureaucracy. At the height of the strikes, Mick Lynch — the de facto leader of the labour movement — famously proclaimed: “the working class is back”.
Given the torrid time the left has had, aspects of the recent strike wave certainly felt invigorating in some ways. Although striking is difficult, it is good and healthy to get away from the sewer of social media, to escape the frustration at the blocked possibilities of electoral politics, and speak to people face to face; to feel and experience the sense of solidarity and comradeship that tends to resurface during strike action. Unionism and strikes can build class consciousness, build new subjectivities, and very often reveal the true nature of class society to those who were previously on the sidelines.
Above all, the strikes were a long overdue — and relieving — reminder that the organised working class retains significant structural power and leverage in society. It still retains the potential to shut down capital and hurt profits. Undoubtedly the recent strike wave was an important period in the class struggle, and will go down in the history of the labour movement in this country. But it is also crucial that we accurately understand the actual ‘balance of forces’ that exist in Britain at present. This is not being miserablist for the sake of it. Corbynism as a movement was defined by naivety. It did not grasp the scale of the challenge it faced or the powerful forces lined up against it. It didn’t even understand the glaringly obvious threat from its own right wing, let alone the power of the British state. Following Lynch’s speech, in the excitement of the early part of the strike waves, some of these tendencies resurfaced: the confusion of political slogans with reality; the desperate longing for a shortcut to power through a charismatic figurehead who will make everything better; a tendency to dramatically overstate the ‘radicalism’ of the present moment and the strength of the trade union movement, best evidenced by repeated calls for a general strike.
For all the positives surrounding the strikes, they were — and are — ultimately defensive struggles. Since the optimism of 2022, hopes that the political left might seize the initiative have ebbed away. In mid-September, after two years of struggle, both the RMT. and ASLEF. voted to accept a pay deal from the new Labour government. In the postal and higher education disputes, workers were forced back to work after accepting ‘deals’ which reduced workers’ terms and conditions. Although the potential capacity of working class power was on display, what was ultimately revealed was the strength and confidence of capital relative to labour in the current conjuncture. Across the board, partnership agreements were torn up. Employers didn’t, as union leaders had hoped, respond to pleas about being reasonable, or fold in the face of bad publicity. Royal Mail, for example, was content to absorb bad publicity (its CEO being humiliated by MPs) and to openly run down the public service in pursuit of its ultimate, long-standing goal — breaking a militant, highly-organised union. Belated threats regarding an all-out strike did not prevent the closure of the Port Talbot blast furnaces, which shut their doors for good at the end of September.
Given the vanguard role played by the CWU over the last 25 years — ‘the miners of the 90s’ — the Royal Mail dispute was a particularly important barometer for understanding the true position of the labour movement in Britain. The scale of Royal Mail’s union busting, and its very real threats to derecognise the CWU, harked back to a different period, and shocked even the most experienced unionists. None of this bodes well for the future of British trade unionism.
The crisis of proletarianisation
Now that the dust has seemingly settled, we can take stock of where we are as a movement. We should return to Lynch’s claim and the questions it raises. Who and what is the working class? Is it back? If it is back, what should we do? If it isn’t, then what next? Who is the revolutionary subject that will carry out societal change?
Much of the modern discourse around class is focused on class in itself; i.e. determining what a class is ‘objectively’, or mapping out what the different classes are and who belongs to which class. It tends to neglect the crucial idea of class consciousness (or class for itself). It is one thing to just describe the working class and their hypothetical potential size and power, but another entirely to think about the conditions and institutions which produce the thorny (and much-debated) process of transubstantiation from merely existing to acting as a collective, coherent and revolutionary body.
As Richard Hoggart argued, in The Uses of Literacy,6 socialist intellectuals have a tendency towards hagiographic portrayals of the working class’s revolutionary tendencies. But romantic, sepia imagery of mining, manufacturing and the welfare state obscures a confrontation with reality: that the working class has been recomposed (or more accurately, decomposed). The era of ‘the job’ (in the sense of steady, secure ‘collectivised’ waged work) seems to be over. It makes more sense to think of the period between 1945-1979 as a historical anomaly, a blip that is not coming back. And as the world of work has changed, so the idealised proletariat of the bygone era is also not coming back, either in appearance or behaviour.
Not only has the working class shrunk in size, it is currently hopelessly divided and scattered by the modern labour process — by short-term, part-time contracts, bogus self-employment, and modern forms of piecework, now carried out by a growing lumpen strata. On top of this, working class communities, and the institutions which historically sustained working class culture and political class consciousness beyond work — sports clubs, libraries, community halls — have similarly been destroyed, very often (of course) by Labour-run councils. The way we work and live is becoming increasingly fragmented and isolated. As Anton Jaeger argues, we live and work more and more like Marx’s French peasants, as ‘potatoes in a sack of potatoes,’ whose relation to their mode of production isolates them from one another.
Changes to work, to communities, to how we live, matter because class consciousness — or coherent politics — does not simply emerge from being poor, however much we might want it to. It requires conscious, boring, long-term organisation, and to be scaffolded by institutions. If we understand proletarianisation purely as ‘lots of people are getting poorer’ or becoming deskilled and stripped of their autonomy, then optimistic accounts of how ‘the working class is growing’ as more and more professionals and white-collar workers slip into it make perfect sense. This understanding of proletarianisation stands behind the discourse of ‘the 99%’ or the wage-earner thesis: the idea that society is polarising into two camps, and that deskilled and degraded professionals and white-collar workers like junior doctors and early career academics can now be identified as part of the working class.
But if we understand the concept of proletarianisation as Mike Davis interprets it in Old Gods, New Enigmas, as the social process of transubstantiation by which workers developed a collective conscience (whereby workers are concentrated in greater masses in workplaces, where they ‘feel their strength more’, and where they get organised) then what is happening under neoliberalism — not just in the developed world, but to a large extent across the globe — is in fact a ‘crisis of proletarianisation’.7 Alejandro Portes and BR Roberts have similarly argued that the rise in the informal, grey economy and of bogus self-employment represents a global trend of ‘deproletarianisation’, as we move away from ‘collective’ workers concentrated in larger workplaces.
In previous epochs there were always sectors and groups which union organisers regarded as impossible to organise. Today, with work and social life fragmenting into isolated bubbles, much of the workforce occupies similar conditions. While workers are becoming poorer and deskilled, they are also becoming harder to organise, and the capacity for class consciousness and coherent action as a collective is declining. Even in our remaining huge workplaces — for example Amazon warehouses — the workforce is transient and vulnerable, and hence the noble efforts to organise these sectors have thus far come to nothing. Davis uses the metaphor of a ‘power grid’ to describe the modern working class, with the organised, class-conscious workers as the core which keeps the grid powered and which provides the main challenge to capital.8 Today, workers like the RMT and the CWU are the ever shrinking, flickering core — an ideal type of politically educated, motivated, experienced and disciplined worker which also has leverage in key industries (and this is precisely the reason they were targeted by the Government) — but the rest of the grid is dimly illuminated indeed. Despite public support for the strikes, union density continues to fall. Among the 27 million workers in the private sector, only 12% are unionised. Unions are now more popular among foremen and supervisors than workers. In most industries, and in former trade union heartlands, union density is falling.
Today, most working-class people are not in unions — many people don’t know what they are: the political culture and residual familial links to unions have largely disappeared. Even in the vanguard industries and unions, something akin to a blood transfusion is taking place, with older, militant workers leaving en masse, being replaced by younger workers on worse terms and conditions — meaning less security, and so less capacity to act — and with less awareness of their rights and the role of unions.
Modern class politics: Anger without organisation
Under conditions of fragmentation, class politics takes on incoherent forms. Most people possess an enduring class identity as well as class instinct — the ‘muscle memory’ and knowledge of what class you are in, an innate dislike of the bosses, and a feeling of unfairness. The majority of people still identify as the working class or ‘the people’, and understand that society is unfair and that social mobility is a lie. Moreover, Resistance is still widespread, but as Daniel Zamora notes, this now tends to be individualised rather than collective: walking off the job, quitting, sickness, etc. We have class struggle, but an atomised form, which allows the status quo to continue.
Without the direction and ‘discipline’ that was previously provided by mass parties and unions, and with the right frequently, however disingenuously, speaking the language of class better than the left, class politics no longer takes the forms we are used to. As Sherry Ortner argues, class is increasingly hidden in other issues, and popular anger is frequently being harnessed by right wing forces. This is clear in the rise in conspiracy theories and in the uptick in non-unionised, anti-state, anti-globalisation protests such as the Gilets Jaunes, the Canadian Trucker Protests, and the rise of farmer protests across Europe. Modern class politics is coalescing into an often chaotic but deeply- rooted (and justified) anti-statism and anti-liberalism among growing sectors of the population that feel ignored, silenced and angry.
The class structure under neoliberal, deindustrialised capitalism increasingly mirrors the complexity of the historical period during the messy initial transition to industrialisation: a mélange of rootless seasonal workers, artisans and hand-workers in cottage industries — semi-proletarians — before industrial factory workers emerged as the idealised vanguard. And just as the class structure has returned to the period immediately preceding the Industrial Revolution, so class struggle increasingly mirrors the dangerous unpredictability of early semi-proletarians. Influenced and moulded by peasant and artisan culture, this group was simultaneously deeply radical yet also unpredictable, spontaneous and violent, acting without the ‘discipline’ of the industrial unions, and often combining composite elements of radicalism and national chauvinism. Yet of course, whether one is a revolutionary agent has nothing to do with one’s individual politics, but is about one’s actions vis a vis the status quo.
Such is the scale of the proletarianisation crisis that Davis wrestles with the idea — raised by Hobsbawm and, of course, Gorz — of whether there is even a historical agent or force that still exists to support socialism in the modern period. If there is still something approaching the idealised proletariat, then it is in militant workers like the RMT and the CWU; but they are outposts, anomalies. ‘The working class’ of course remains, as a cultural category and identity — but is increasingly not the ‘idealised’ factory proletariat of sepia-toned nostalgia, and we also cannot guarantee whether its instincts will align with ‘left’ values.
What next? Organising during times of chaos
Broadly, there are two possible responses to these changes. The first is aiming for renewal: organising and rebuilding within this new society, using the tools and methods of the past in order to try and achieve what was achieved in previous decades — a mass trade union movement, strong communities with anchor institutions, a new mass left party with roots in these communities. Moulding the new, inchoate class structure into the ideal proletariat would require (at least) a decades-long programme of deep organising : new unions, new community institutions, new parties. I would imagine this is the vision of most socialists who are now thinking of a new left party. But is this realistic, or even desirable? The scale of the work needed may simply be too great, which may explain the emergence of a strain of nihilism and despair among some sections of the left, and, from others, the tendency to stick with the shortcut of the Labour Party, or to imagine that a new left party, without any of the limits of Labour, can easily be formed. I have a recurring, nagging feeling that we may be trying to force the new, changed society into forms of organising and praxis that were developed in and for a different period, and which were never successful anyway. The objective basis for these forms of politics may well be past. Perhaps we need to relieve ourselves of nostalgia for that kind of politics, as well as the perennial nostalgia for an older form of working class life of the kind that Hoggart critiques.
We must also reflect on whether we are in fact pining for a past that never was: one could certainly argue that, barring 1926 (the impact of which has itself been overstated), movements comprised of the ‘ideal’ proletarian subject were never as revolutionary or oppositional as is commonly claimed, and of course have often been unsuccessful and unpopular. David Edgerton and Ross McKibbin have repeatedly pointed out that the British socialist movement—or at least its parliamentary form—never commanded the broad electoral support of the majority of workers.
Indeed, as Craig Calhoun famously noted, throughout history, community-based social movements have existed alongside ‘pure’ class-based movements. These movements, which we would today call ‘populist’, were often far more radical in their demands and actions than the ‘ideal’ organised class-based movements. In Britain, the first wave of the Industrial Revolution—a period of proto-industrialisation—represented the most dangerous period for the British state: the Merthyr rising, the Chartists, Peterloo. This period of social insurrection was not led by ‘the proletariat’, but by a mixture of artisans, farmers, and semi-proletarians.
In fact, across the world, the majority of social change and protest has never in fact been led by the ‘proletariat’, but by cross-class movements in which ‘class’ alone has never been the sole locus. This was the case in national liberation movements, including the Cuban revolution; in race- and gender-focused civil rights movements across the West; and in recent years has also been the case for the Arab spring. Today, environmental movements and pro-Palestine movements have been far more willing to take on the state and imperialism than the union hierarchy, using innovative forms of direct action which replicate the disruption of strikes. Whilst sometimes incoherent, many of these movements have been more ‘oppositional’ vis a vis capital and the state than purely class-based movements. Indeed, the ‘discipline’ of the formal, organised, class-based movements has often acted as a dampener on action, tending towards a narrow ‘trade union consciousness’ and compromise through the incorporation of the unions and social democratic parties into the state, including into the imperialist state. This is not to claim that these movements or intermediate classes are innately more revolutionary or progressive, but rather to say that there is clearly no perfect revolutionary subject or method of organising: proletarian movements have failed, and so have non-proletarian ones.
The class structure has changed, and so has the ‘revolutionary subject’. But rather than despair, there is cause for optimism. The problem is not with ‘the people’: there is widespread hostility to the state, to politicians, and to war, and mass support for redistributive politics. Perhaps we should not try to go back, to use the rigid tools of the past for a changed, chaotic class structure; to try and cram the existing, chaotic class society into outdated political categories, frameworks and organising methods developed for a simpler class society. The task facing us now is to find the right tools with which to organise, and to discover how to embed ourselves in a milieu with which we are not familiar.
Dan Evans is a writer and academic based in South Wales. He is the author of A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie (Repeater, 2023).
- 1
The IPPR’s report “Half of Us: Turnout Patterns At the 2024 Election” found that 52.8% of the working age population voted in 2024 (this is lower than the 59.9% “turnout” figures which account for the percentage of registered voters). The report also found that “the less wealthy” were significantly less likely to vote. Other work by the report’s authors, shows a widening turnout gap between the university and non-university educated, between top and bottom income terciles, and between homeowners and renters. Whilst none of this can precisely be treated as a proxy for “class”, the classed tendencies ought to be clear.
- 2
Peter Mair. 2013. Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy. London: Verso, p.1
- 3
For Blair’s success in winning over lower middle class voters see Robin Blackburn’s 1997 NLR essay “Reflections on Blair’s Velvet Revolution”.
- 4
I argue this in more depth in my 2023 book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie. London: Repeater, p.77, 279
- 5
Mike Davis. 2018. Old Gods, New Enigmas: Marx’s Lost Theory. London: Verso, pp.25-33
- 6
Richard Hoggart. [1957]. 1958. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life. Harmondsworth: Pelican, p.14
- 7
Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas, pp.5-6
- 8
Davis. Old Gods, New Enigmas, p.24
