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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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