In 1996, a monograph written by two Australian sociologists, Jan Pakulski and Malcolm Waters, was published. The message conveyed by title – The Death of Class – could not have been clearer. In the book, Pakulski and Waters suggest that the concept of class has lost any usefulness for understanding contemporary societies: ‘[C]lasses are dissolving and … the most advanced societies are no longer class societies. … [C]lass societies are specific historical entities. They were born with industrial capitalism, changed their form under the impact of organised or corporatized capitalism, and are disappearing in the face of post-industrialization and postmodernization’ (Pakulski and Waters, 1996: 4).
I reference Pakulski and Waters not because their claim was unique or innovative, but because it is a very forceful expression of the widespread scepticism towards class among social scientists.1 Throughout my intellectual
In what follows, I will argue that class is of crucial importance for understanding contemporary (and any other) capitalist societies. I follow the lead of Richard Hoggart (1989: vii), one of the founding fathers of British cultural studies, who remarked in a preface to The Road to Wigan Peer, George Orwell’s classical study of the everyday lives of Lancashire and Yorkshire workers: ‘Class distinctions do not die, they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves. … Each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty.’ My book is about showing that the coffin is empty still. There are novel ways in which class is expressed in present-day capitalism, and we can identify these expressions with the help of social theory and empirical analysis. In other words, my general research interest is to put forward an argument for the continued existence of class in the 21st century. Following the lead of materialist understandings of capitalism, I argue that class is intrinsically linked to the organization of work across society, which means that my book is also about labour relations.
In the neoliberal age, a number of important contributions to class analysis have focused on studying ‘up’: They have analysed capitalist classes and
Arguably, researching working classes is more complicated. It may be tempting to study them in analogy to capitalist classes, that is, by looking at how workers have been building networks through the formation of trade unions und workers’ parties. The problem is that there are ambiguities and contradictions surrounding the class effects of those organizations. A good illustration is the red-and-green government in Germany, which was in office from 1998 to 2005 and was based on a coalition between one of the eldest workers’ parties in the world, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, and the Green Party. Initially, this coalition enjoyed broad support among trade unionists. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder liked to stress that he was from a family considered ‘anti-social [die Asozialen]’, and that his mother had been a cleaner (cited in Zastrow, 2004). Nevertheless, he and his government were responsible for the most comprehensive process of welfare state retrenchment in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany. Was this a government acting on behalf of the German working class? Was the Social Democratic Party still a workers’ party? And were the representatives of German unions who sat on the commission that planned the restructuring process, and who consented to it, representing working-class interests? This key episode in recent German history underscores how difficult it is to capture the side of labour in class relations in capitalism. It may be necessary to consider that they are institutionalized in and through the capitalist state. Arguably, the latter’s workings mean that working classes, as collective actors, exist in states of flux and fragmentation, and that many of the institutions facilitating their organization can also have adverse effects.
Next to these general points, there is a point to be made about the recent development of class relations in the global political economy. Despite countervailing trends at specific times and in specific places, there was, all in all, a long period of advances of working-class forces that started after the Second World War and ended in the 1970s; and a long period of decline
So where is the working class in the 21st century? In my search, I have engaged with theories and analyses from the social sciences; media coverage;
A book that stood out for me was Thorsten Nagelschmidt’s novel Arbeit [Work] (2020). In it, Nagelschmidt depicts a spring night in Kreuzberg in the early 2020s. Kreuzberg is an inner-city district of Berlin known for its vibrant nightlife. It used to be, and to a degree still is, a residential area for migrant workers and their families, but has become heavily gentrified in recent years. In a number of intersecting episodes, Nagelschmidt describes how the Kreuzberg nightlife and life in the city in general are sustained thanks to people working through this night – two paramedics and a pickpocket, two drug dealers and two police officers; two shopkeepers and a hostel manager; a delivery rider and a bouncer; a street sweeper and a taxi driver. The lives of the protagonists are connected because they all operate under same constraint – the constraint of capital accumulation, which forces them to keep going: ‘[T]he invisible hand burps with a feeling of satiety and contentment, wipes its mouth and says: the sky is the limit [English in the original], please carry on’ (Nagelschmidt, 2020: 282).3 And they are all connected insofar as they cross paths during this one night, with many of characters in some way or another taking care of other people.
It could have been me, thinks Tanja, while they hoist the narcotized patient to a hospital stretcher. People have pain, people are hungry, and people are lonely, we drive to their homes – for a pittance and always in a hurry. We arrived in this city some time ago from somewhere with some expectations, and we now try to get by somehow, and sometimes someone kisses the dust, at some time everyone kisses the dust. (Nagelschmidt, 2020: 94–5)
Later in the night, while carrying an ailing older woman to hospital in her ambulance, Tanja offers a reflection on the general situation: ‘The people who govern this city are at all nicely at home now, she thinks, it is just us, us
If we follow Nagelschmidt, it does not matter so much where workers are from or what exactly they are doing – they are connected, and aware of their connection, which is expressed through Tanja’s use of the words ‘we’ and ‘together’. What they have in common is that they have to work to survive and their work is a struggle; that they earn very little; that they are not among those who make decisions over how things are run (those who ‘govern’); that they cooperate with and support one another, and also help those who are even less fortunate; and that they keep society going. They operate in the cover of the night and at the margins of public attention, which is focused on the endless spectacle of the Berlin nightlife, and their work in its connectedness, as well as their acts of solidarity, are rendered invisible. Thanks to existence of those links and of solidarity, they can be said to be a class-in-formation – but a class that is constantly undergoing changes and is in flux because of the fleeting nature of their encounters.
Notably, none of Nagelschmidt’s characters have a job in manufacturing and conform to the classical image of proletarian as a young to middle-aged White man with limited formal education, and none mention being aligned with a union or a workers’ party. They are a diverse group of people – they differ in their educational backgrounds and their skills, are of different ages and genders, and hail from different parts of Berlin, Germany and the wider world. Nevertheless, as is expressed in Tanja’s thoughts, there is a feeling of belonging together, and of not being among those who are in charge.
Despite Nagelschmidt’s gritty, detailed descriptions of everyday life in Berlin, the imaginary he produces – like most literary narratives – lends itself to somewhat idealizing interpretations. It follows a storyline, and it is crucial for this storyline that the lives of the characters intersect. The police and the hostel manager may be trying to help other people. But is this enough to believe that they are on the same footing as everyone else? And importantly, my claim that Nagelschmidt describes a class-in-formation is based on my interpretation of the book. He does not even mention the word ‘class’. Yet the strength of literature of this kind is that it expands our fields of vision and gives us clues on what to look for when we try to make sense of the world – and where to find it.
My book is about working classes, and I have been guided somewhat by Nagelschmidt when I looked for them – in non-industrial sectors, among diverse groups of workers, and in acts that connect people and are based on solidarity, namely strikes. Indeed, a key assumption guiding my research is that strikes are points where class relations crystallize in greater clarity than in other social situations. It is here that the connection between the organization of work in capitalist societies and social conflict comes into view, as well as the fact that people organize around their work. It is also
Alexander Gallas
Berlin, October 2022
Even thirty years ago, the claim that class was dead was by no means new or original. At different historical junctures in the 20th century, scholars from a range of intellectual traditions and disciplinary backgrounds have questioned the viability and utility of the concept. The liberal economist Friedrich August Hayek was a leading anti-socialist intellectual in the postwar decades and one of the promoters of the free market (see Gallas, 2014). He put forward a principled, polemical critique of the concept at the level of social theory – not so much of the existence of ‘income classes’, whose existence he acknowledged (Hayek, 1988: 123), but of the notion of a ‘dominant “class”’. According to him, one should reject the assumption of a ‘conspiracy’ in which this class manipulates society for its purposes because the latter is the complex product of ‘abstract and spontaneous ordering patterns’ (Hayek, 1988: 82). Needless to say, this critique rests on what is at most a caricature of Marxian thinking. Indeed, Marx could not have been clearer that he regarded class domination not a product of manipulation or conspiracy but of mechanisms inscribed in the capitalist mode of production (1976: 92, 201; see Part II in this volume). The reduction of social and economic inequality in the Global North after the Second World War caused a number of sociologists to question the empirical reality of class. As Pakulski and Waters acknowledge (1996: 17), Robert Nisbet already argued in the 1950s that ‘the term social class … is nearly valueless for the clarification of the data of wealth, power, and social status in contemporary United States and much of Western society’ (1959: 11). Making a similar point around the same time, West German sociologist Helmuth Schelsky detected the ‘emergence of a levelled, petty bourgeois, medium status society’. According to him, this society was ‘neither proletarian nor bourgeois’ and ‘characterised by the loss of class tension and social hierarchy’ (1952: 287; emphasis in the original). Likewise, French sociologist Raymond Aron wondered whether people really saw themselves as belonging to a class, or whether this was a sociological fiction (1960: 10). At the turn of the millennium, this found an echo in the work of Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheimer, who recognized the existence of structured inequalities but argued that individualization had rendered class identity irrelevant (2002: 31; for a critique of conceptions of class based on inequality and identity, see Chapter 4). Last but not least, a strand in left thinking abandoned the idea of the working class as a privileged collective actor in the struggle for human emancipation, which reflected the rise of the ‘new’ social movements and the ossification of authoritarian, Soviet-style socialism. Among the authors in question were André Gorz (1982), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) and Moishe Postone (1993). For a systematic critique of Postone’s reading of Karl Marx, see Gallas (2006; 2011).
‘The main effect of 1989 is that capitalism and the rich have, for the time being, stopped being scared. All that made Western democracy worth living for its people – social security, the welfare state, a high and rising income for its wage-earners, and its natural consequences, diminution in social inequality and inequality of life chances – was the result of fear. Fear of the poor, and the largest and best-organised bloc of citizens in industrialised states – the workers; fear of an alternative that existed and could have spread, notably in the form Soviet Communism. Fear of the system’s own instability’ (Hobsbawm, 1991: 122).
All quotations contained in this book from non-English language publications have been translated by the author.