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The general strike stands out as a form of labour unrest because of its openly visible class dimension. It calls the entire labour force across a society to stop work. By definition, stoppages only count as general strikes if they are based on cross-sectional, inclusive solidarity. Sometimes this is done exclusively for political aims, for example when people protest against an authoritarian government. But often, general strikes are organic strikes: They articulate economic and political demands and formulate a general, class-based agenda. In so doing, they usually concern the organization of work across the whole of society and create a divide between workers on one side and capital and the government on the other. Consequently, they are of particular interest when one examines working-class formation. The Spanish state is a useful test case for examining the demands, constituencies and dynamics of general strikes. Since la Transición, there have been ten union-led, national, general strikes (1985, 1988, 1992, 1994, 2002, 2003, 2010, 2012 [March] and 2012 [November]); two general national strikes with mass participation led by feminist organizations (2018 and 2019); and a number of regional mobilizations. In what follows, I will focus on the two most recent cycles of struggle and explore their connection: the cycle spanning the beginning of the Great Crisis and the sovereign debt crisis from 2008 until 2014, which includes three general strikes against austerity, and the subsequent cycle encompassing the two feminist general strikes against violence against women, the precarity of women workers, the disregard for care work and the effects of austerity on the social infrastructure.
Karl Marx famously argued that the historical emergence of the working class as a collective actor resulted from acts of resistance against the continuous extension of the working day, which occurred in the context of the Industrial Revolution and was driven by capitalist competition. In an age where parts of the world experience sustained processes of deindustrialization, this raises the question of what happens to working classes when the factory gates are shut for good. It is possible to address this issue by resorting to strike research and focusing on the service and public sectors. Accordingly, the research question addressed in this book is this: What are the class effects of non-industrial strikes – or how far do they contribute to working-class formation? The author addresses it by taking three steps. First, he shows that the existing global labour studies literature insufficiently engages with class theory; second, he addresses this shortcoming by conceptualizing class and class formation from a critical-realist and materialist angle; and third, he conducts an incorporated comparison of non-industrial strike action around the globe in the age of the Great Crisis by (a) mapping 387 strikes in the service and public sectors from 56 countries and autonomous territories and (b) by zooming in on the railway strikes in Germany, the junior doctors’ strikes in Britain and the general strikes against austerity and the feminist general strikes in Spain.
This chapter summarises the co-constitution of the class and economic order politics of successive governments, their movement between defensive, consolidatory and offensive steps in class struggle, and changes in the orientation of labour market policy and governance. In addition, a brief reflection on social security and employment policy under the Conservative Government of Rishi Sunak is provided that points to policy continuity. Throughout 2022–23 the Conservative Government responded to the political recomposition of labour and resurgent labour autonomy by enacting further restrictions on trade union activity, deepening a regressive two nations mode of leadership and renewing the offensive against claimants by once again turning to the threat of exclusion as the means to activate non-employed claimants, and low- waged recipients of Universal Credit (and their partners where relevant) in order to expand the labour power being brought to market. The form of activation that began to be signalled during the late 1980s and whose development was understood by Aufheben (1998), to be focused on curtailing claimant autonomy, has persisted, and in 2023 remains dominant in what remains conceptualised here as a regressive market-liberal orientation in labour market policy and governance.
Sitting at my desk and composing this last section of my book, I revert to looking at images of work, this time two pictures on my wall. Up in front of me is a reproduction of a painting by Mancunian artist L.S. Lowry from the mid-20th century. It depicts a football match on a bleak, grey day in what is presumably the Northwest of England. We see a goal and two teams battling it out on pitch. Two of the players, one representing each side, are jumping towards the ball, probably with the aim of heading it. They are surrounded by their respective teammates. In the foreground, there is a perimeter, and a few people watching who are positioned in front of it, mostly with their backs turned towards the observer. In the back, an industrial cityscape is visible: smoking chimneys, factory buildings and a gasometer. In Lowry’s painting, we glimpse what philosopher Bertrand Russell called, with dismissive overtones, the ‘industrial civilization’ (2010). He referred to a way of life centred on industrial work and the factory, which was prevalent, in the 19th and 20th century, in many parts of Britain, Western Europe and the wider world. Lowry’s imagery indicates that this civilization is characterized by strenuous, manual labour and a popular culture that celebrates comradery and confrontational physical activity (see Gramsci, 1971: 277–320; Hobsbawm, 1984: 182). And arguably, he depicts a male-dominated world. In the picture, there are only two females – a woman and a girl watching from outside the perimeter.
This chapter examines changes to employment and social security policy and goverance in the tumultuous politics that followed the vote to the leave the European Union, and persisted through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. The period between the end of 2016 and 2019 being marked by a shift to a consolidationist step. Ministers pushed forward with the continued roll out of Universal Credit, tweaked the benefit conditionality regime and scaled back the size of the employment service quasi-market. A commitment to marketised delivery, benefit retrenchment and sanctioning remained central however to the state’s approach to activating claimants (Wright and Dwyer, 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic gave added impetus to consolidation with no fundamental changes made to working age social security benefits, as government sought to freeze the form and power relation of the pre-pandemic labour market and supporting state institutions. To mitigate the threat of mass unemployment and improve support for claimants during ‘lockdowns’ emergency measures were rolled out as temporary departures from normal practice. Acutely sensitive to the risk such measures posed to class power relations, the various measures that improved claimant autonomy were rolled back as the pandemic eased (Wiggan and Grover, 2022). The smooth restoration of a repressive market-liberal labour market policy orientation, however, was disrupted by post-pandemic labour makret disruption that co-consistuted with the political recomposition of labour.
From what I discussed in the last chapter, it follows that the overall aim of Marxist class theory is to identify features of the capitalist mode of production with class effects. Any conceptualization of class in capitalism based on a critical-realist, materialist ontology needs to have a specific entry point – a vantage point from which it is possible to discern how class relations are produced and reproduced. If we follow Marx’s line of argument in the first volume of Capital (1976: 90), there are, at the heart of each mode of production, distinct relations of production, which concern how ownership of ‘the object and the means of labour’ also conditions people’s relations with each other (Poulantzas, 1974: 18). Accordingly, it makes sense to start one’s theorization of class from here. The capitalist relations of production entail a specific division of labour that is the foundation of class relations in any capitalist social formation (Poulantzas, 1974: 18; Marx, 1976: 415; Carchedi, 1977: 1). In a nutshell, the capitalist organization of work determines, in the first instance, how class is lived and experienced. It creates a force field that conditions people’s lives. We can call this the class structure – a term that points to pre-existing social conditions under which people encounter each other, and under which they act, which is located in the ontological domain of the ‘deep’. Starting from the relations of production, I explain, in what follows, how class in capitalism can be conceptualized, that is, what the capitalist class structure looks like, and why the state plays an important role in its constitution.
This chapter examines how the offensive step launched by the Conservatives in the 1980s manifested in the area of social security and employment programmes. For the New Right the institutions and practices of corporatist social democratic capitalism had distorted the ‘natural’ working of the market, constrained employer autonomy (Joseph, 1978; Thatcher, 1995) and eroded the domination of labour, upon which exploitation and business profitability rests (Gallas, 2016).
Amid rapid rises in unemployment that accompanied the abandonment of full employment the pivot to an offensive step in the field of labour market policy was limited, as an economic order politics marked by concerns with social cohesion prevailed over reforms to advance domination. Conscious of public disquiet, ministers sought to depoliticise unemployment and shore up their electoral flank by expanding pacificatory Special Employment Measures and retaining corporatist delivery mechanisms (Moon and Richardson, 1985). Minor benefit retrenchment and a growing emphasis on training indicated the future direction of policy to recompose labour for the post-industrial labour market envisaged. The contingent configuration of class and economic politics are understood here then as creating a pacificatory but transitional orientation in labour market policy and governance.
As I argued in Chapter 1, it makes sense, in the context of an incorporated comparison focusing on deindustrialization, to zoom in on Western Europe and examine different national cases that reflect different aspects of the variegation of global capitalism. After all, Western Europe was the first macroregion in the world to industrialize, and it has been witnessing sustained processes of deindustrialization in recent decades, which is at odds with the global trend (see Figure 5.1). Against this backdrop, I have three chosen country cases that represent political and economic hubs in Western Europe, and that each reflect the characteristic varieties of capitalism in the region: Britain as a ‘liberal market economy’, Germany as a ‘coordinated market economy’ and Spain as a ‘Mediterranean mixed type’. In line with the general development of industrial employment in the region, all three countries have been experiencing sustained processes of deindustrialization. In 2019, industrial workers constituted 18.1, 27.2 and 20.4 per cent of the overall workforce in Britain, Germany and Spain, respectively, and 22.7 per cent across the macroregion. This is a decline of 11.8, 10.2 and 11.4 percentage points if compared to the figures for 1992 – all roughly in line with each other and above the Western European average of 8.7 percentage points. Clearly, industrial workers are a minority in the overall workforce, and their sector does not heavily dominate the economy in any of the three countries or in Western Europe as a whole.
This chapter elaborates how New Labour’s concern with repeat transitions between employment, unemployment benefits, and employment programmes, and difficulties in securing voluntary participation of non-employed claimants in active labour market programmes contributed to a further suite of welfare reforms to curtail claimant autonomy during its third term in office. Moves to narrow eligibility for out of work benefits paid on grounds of caring for a child, or incapacity for paid work were extolled as improving the opportunity for all to participate in paid work. In parallel, the governance of employment programmes was reconfigured to make greater use of financial incentives and contracted providers to shape the behaviour of frontline staff and drive a focus on securing sustained job outcomes for unemployed claimants. The 2008–09 recession disrupted the form and tempo of marketisation, and the feasibility of ramping up the intensity of activation applied to unemployed and non-employed claimants. Employment and social security policy and governance and societal expectations of claimants had, however, been transformed by the class and economic order politics of New Labour’s progressive-market liberalism.
This chapter details the pivot to an offensive step against labour in the reform of labour market policy. Having prioritised pacification and depoliticisation in the first half of the 1980s, the attention of the Conservative Government now shifted to re-establishing control over the unemployed population, as it moved to establish a clearer divide between claimants who could form part of the labour reserve, and claimants deemed largely surplus to the requirements of capital in the emergent post-industrial flexible labour market. That is, the emphasis in the cohering of class and economic order politics begins to move in favour of benefit and training reforms intended to prioritise labour’s subordination rather than societal cohesion.
With government intending the state to facilitate, rather than frustrate a recomposition of labour commensurate with supporting labour flexibility, attention turned to strengthened policing of benefits and bringing an end to the role of trade unions within labour market policy and governance. This saw the end of a labour market policy oriented to conciliation and pacification, and transition to a more conservative and market-liberal order was coming into view.
