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Ruth Levitas
© Ruth Levitas 2008
The suggestion that class and class politics are dead misses two important
distinctions. One is the difference between class as a structural characteristic
of society and a causal factor in the lives of individuals, and class as the
basis of social and political identification and mobilisation – in Marx’s
terms, the difference between a class in itself and a class for itself. The
other is the distinction between class politics as a form of resistance and
struggle by the working classes, and class politics as a form of attack on
the working classes, broadly defined as those who must sell their labour to
survive. I argue that class is not dead. Class remains the key structuring
principle of people’s life chances in Britain, just as the accumulation
of capital remains the key driving principle of the national and the global
economy. However, the apparent absence of class politics - that is a class-based
politics of resistance from below - is actually the product of the presence
of class politics: three decades of class war from above that has been successful
both economically and hegemonically.
Class war from above never declares itself in those terms. Indeed, in an era
where direct and indirect discrimination on the basis of gender, ethnicity,
religion, disability, age and sexual orientation are all outlawed across Europe,
class and economic inequality are the one area not addressed by ‘equalities’
legislation. Economic inequalities have greatly intensified over the last
thirty years. Britain was economically at its least unequal in 1976; and as
inequality has risen inexorably, social mobility has, as you would expect,
fallen. The rhetoric of meritocracy and equal opportunity has increased in
volume and intensity as they have become less and less real. Since 1979, the
proportion of national income taken by the bottom 30 per cent of the population
has dropped from 17 per cent to 11 per cent, while that taken by the top 10
per cent has risen from just over 20 per cent to almost 30 per cent. Put another
way, in 1979, the top 10 per cent had five times the share of national income
of the bottom ten per cent. In 2005, the ratio had increased to eighteen to
one. Minority ethnic groups are overwhelmingly concentrated in lower income
groups. Health and education inequalities persist.
Incomes within the top ten per cent have become far more dispersed, with the
largest increases seen in the top 1 per cent. The average identifiable income
for that group is, as Jonathan Rutherford’s contribution to this debate
notes, £780,000 a year. Unlike Rutherford, I would not use the term
‘earn’ in relation to incomes of this size, partly because a substantial
proportion is investment income, but more importantly because it might be
taken to imply that such incomes are in some sense merited. The top 1 per
cent have also increased their share of marketable wealth, and now own nearly
a quarter of all marketable wealth, and a third if housing is excluded. This
largely invisible wealth and economic power underpins a form of class recomposition
that is generally unremarked. The increasing concentration of income and wealth
in a few hands has a distorting effect on the housing market as a whole. It
has also been accompanied by a boom in the building of new stately homes,
together with a return into private hands of some older buildings - some of
major importance - as a new upper class can afford to buy, build, maintain
and staff such homes. For rising inequality also affects the occupational
structure, notably by increasing the number of people employed as domestic
servants.
Culturally, this has been accompanied by a relegitimation not only of economic
inequality, but of the attitudes and values of an aristocratic class. This
is a widespread and insidious process, illustrated by two notable exercises
in humiliation television, What the Butler Saw and Ladette to
Lady. The first was set in Peacock House, a spectacular 1906 creation
by Halsey Ricardo for Lord Debenham, which for most of the second half of
the twentieth century was the headquarters of the Richmond Fellowship, but
which was sold as a private residence by Ilchester Estates in 2000. In a bizarre
combination of Big Brother, Faking It and Upstairs Downstairs, an
extended working-class family from South London were to be transformed into
aristocrats, with the failing chavs evicted on a weekly basis at the behest
of the servants. Ladette to Lady similarly takes ill-behaved young
women and subjects them to the regime of a 1950s Finishing School, with the
obligatory evictions, the goal being to enable them to pass in an overtly
upper class setting. In both cases, the object of ridicule is working class
failure to meet the ‘standards’ of aristocratic manners in settings
such as formal dinner parties with ‘real’ toffs. Both represent
working class people as feckless, foulmouthed and socially incompetent, just
as Shameless represents poverty as driven by the personal defects of poor
people. But what these programmes also do is represent upper class privilege
as legitimate, aspirational, but out of the reach of chavs because they don’t
know how to behave.
The redistribution to the rich, the validation of inequality, the relegitimation
of exclusive class culture are all a form of class politics – a class
war from above that presents toffs as ordinary, and antagonism to upper class
privilege as outdated envy. The success of this was manifest in the Crewe
by-election and the London Mayoral elections. Pointing out that Tory candidates
are toffs is now seen as cheap point-scoring against nice ordinary blokes
– a hegemonic victory that makes it more than likely that the next election
will result in a Conservative government, and the country will again be run
by a bunch of Old Etonians. And yes, it does matter. This is class politics,
masquerading as the general interest; appeals to class as the basis of resistance
is read as ‘divisive’.
What has disappeared is class as an organising identification for a politics
of resistance and transformation. This is partly because New Labour was from
the outset a disaster, a continuation of Thatcherite neo-liberalism in a different
guise. But the problem runs deeper than this. The recomposition of the working
classes had, in the 1980s, a great deal more attention than the recomposition
of the ruling class. Economic restructuring and the destruction of Britain’s
industrial base removed the conditions of mass labour that Marx and Engels
identified as critical to the emergence of class consciousness. It also revealed
the diversity of the working class in terms of both gender and ethnicity and
eroded (at least to some extent) the patriarchal structure of the Trade Union
movement. But the 1984/5 Miners’ Strike was a critical point in terms
of class politics, not just because it was a major political defeat. Discursively,
this entailed the delegitimation of organised labour as a collective subject.
In particular, the claim to ‘the right to work’, previously a
collective claim to livelihood, was reconstructed as an individual
right to be exercised against the Union. Subsequently, trade unionism itself
has survived largely by its re-invention as a protection of the rights of
individual workers, rather than a class-based campaigning body for
collective rights and advancement. Even the term ‘collective bargaining’
now has an archaic ring.
The progressive individualisation of the last two decades, reinforced by the
erosion of collective provision against risk, has driven this process further,
albeit accompanied by an assault on civil liberties and thus individual rights.
I would be more hopeful of a resurgence in class consciousness and of a recognition
of the common interests of those who must sell their labour to survive were
it not for the alternative bases of collective identification that have been
promoted by New Labour and have come to prevail. The very necessary understanding
of the diversity of the population has led to an underwriting of identities
in terms of ethnic origin and religious affiliation. We are enjoined to understand
ourselves as a ‘community of communities’, with those communities
being primarily faith-based. If the representativeness of the old trade union
leadership was questionable, it was certainly no more questionable than the
authority of the views of unelected and unaccountable patriarchs of assorted
religions. As Philip Pullman has argued, the tendency to fix identity in terms
of one aspect of experience, and to focus this on pasts rather than futures,
is damaging both individually and socially. As Roberto Unger has argued, we
need to understand ourselves as agents and subjects in the making, and in
terms of what we might become rather than simply where we came from. Complex
identities and affiliations of ethnic origin and religion are not intrinsically
antithetical to class-based politics: one has only to recall the solidaristic
opposition to Fascism by Irish dockers, English workers and second generation
Jewish immigrants in the 1936 Battle of Cable Street. But they can be –
and are – used as a means of marginalizing class as the basis of collective
self-understandings. The hegemonic representation of reference to
class as divisive works very well to prevent the development of class consciousness,
and to conceal this still fundamental division between the super-rich and
the bulk of the population. It is this hegemonic mode of self-understanding
and representation that needs to change to enable the much-needed re-emergence
of class politics.
Ruth Levitas is Professor of Sociology at the University
of Bristol and
author of The Inclusive Society? Social Exclusion and New Labour.
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