labor leaders never tire of referring to their members as “middle class,” part of the great washed masses between the “dirt poor” and the “filthy rich.” This is, of course, nonsense that separates better-off workers from their poorer brothers and sisters—and to some extent white from Black and brown. There is, however, an actual middle class, not between the rich and poor but between capital and labor. There can be no clear definition of this middle class or even of where it begins and ends in relation to the working class. As Marx noted in his very brief and unfinished section in Capital, Volume III, entitled simply “Classes,” “It is undeniably in England that this modern society and its economic articulation is most widely and classically developed. Even here, though, this class articulation does not emerge in pure form. Here, too, middle and transitional levels always conceal the boundaries.”32 In a society constantly changing under the pressures of capital accumulation, it can hardly be otherwise.
The word “transitional” is particularly interesting, as it would appear to refer to groups moving from one class to another, most commonly a process of proletarianization. While Marx’s prediction that the petit-bourgeoisie and other middle layers would disappear has proven to be wrong, there has been an undeniable tendency for formerly middle-class occupations to take on more and more of the characteristics of working-class labor and life. The “autonomy” of many professions has been eroded as capital pushes them for greater output and longer hours and directs their work more closely: that is, becomes “purely despotic.” Not surprisingly, more professionals have been joining unions. An outstanding example of this, covered elsewhere in this collection, is nurses, who have been joining unions and striking at higher rates than any other group.33
Race, Ethnicity, and Gender
The ever-expanding nature of capitalism leads it to draw in more and more human material from the rural periphery of the world. The US working class has seen a dramatic shift in its racial and ethnic composition, due heavily to increased immigration. The number of Latino/as in the civilian workforce, for example, has jumped from a little over six million in 1980 to almost twenty-three million by 2010. This inevitably rubs up against the pre-existing forms of racial and ethnic prejudice and hierarchy bred by slavery, nationalism, and imperialism. Viewing the working class in Britain in his day, Marx wrote to friends, “Every industrial and commercial center in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians.The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.”34
In the United States, of course, racial and ethnic divisions are far more prevalent, as the workforce has long been more diverse than that of nineteenth-century Britain and racism more deeply embedded in the institutional structure of American society. We know now that more than economic competition is involved in the constant reproduction not only of racial attitudes but of the evolving forms of institutional racism. Racial hierarchy and competition exist not only in the labor market but in every aspect of life in the United States, notably housing, education, public resources, credit. Massive immigration in recent years has collided with this pre-existing racial hierarchy to the detriment of immigrants, who are perceived as a threat by many working-class whites not only in terms of jobs but in all the areas just listed.
Women have always been more or less half of the working class, but their place in that class and in society has changed dramatically since Marx could talk about the value of the worker’s labor power supporting “his family.” While there have always been women in employment, from the 1950s they have entered the US labor force in growing numbers. Since 1970, the number of women in the workforce has increased from about thirty-two million to seventy-two million in 2010 to become 47 percent of the workforce. By 2010 the workforce participation rate of married women almost equaled that of unmarried women.35 On the other hand, full-time women workers still earned only 80 percent of their male counterparts’ earnings, and that due largely to the fall in male earnings. In addition, far more women than men worked in lower-paying part-time employment and held multiple jobs.36 Nevertheless, the value of the labor power of women, whether married or not, was now a major source of the “subsistence” of the working class as a whole.While this has not brought an end to sexism or patriarchy, it has given women a more prominent place in daily affairs and in the labor movement, where women went from 25 percent of all members in the 1970s to 45 percent in 2012.
While organized labor in the United States is far from free of racism or sexism, it is nonetheless the most integrated institution in American society. Below is a table with the racial and gender composition of US unions in 2012.
The “Real Class Organization”
It was Engels who, in his 1844 Conditions of the Working-Class in England, first pointed to unions, or “combinations” as they were then called, as the major means of resisting the aggression of capital. Strikes were, he wrote, “the military school of the workingmen in which they prepare themselves for the great struggle which cannot be avoided,” adding that “as schools of war, the Unions are unexcelled.”38 Later, in his 1875 critique of the Gotha program of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD by its German initials), Engels denounced the absence of trade unions in the program, calling them “the real class organization of the proletariat.”39 Similarly, in The Poverty of Philosophy Marx wrote that it was through strikes and unions that “the proletarians effect their organization as a class.” Their battles he termed “a veritable civil war.”40 In fact, Marx and Engels were the first socialists to see unions as central to the class struggle and hence to the fight for socialism.
As Draper pointed out, Marx and Engels would become critical of the conservatism of British trade unions. Nevertheless, unions remained central to their view of building class organization and consciousness. Unions were, of course, key to the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association.41 It is not just that class conflict of this sort is an unexcelled school of war; unions are the basis for the political movement of the class. Writing to a friend in 1871, Marx said: “The political movement of the working class has as its ultimate object, of course, the conquest of political power for this class, and this naturally requires a previous organization of the working class developed up to a certain point and arising precisely from its economic struggles.”42 This did not mean that every trade union struggle or every strike wave becomes political in the sense in which Marx uses the term here. But it does give a certain priority to economics—in the form of union organization—and to the possibility that economic struggle leads to political struggle—here he gives the example of the fight for an eight-hour working-day law.
That this process is not inevitable has been all too well demonstrated by the history of the US labor movement. This is precisely why trade union work by socialists is so essential to drawing out the meaning of the daily conditions and conflict as well as that of the high points of struggle. Elsewhere in this collection, various essays address this topic from different angles, particularly “The Rank-and-File Strategy” and its “Update,” so I won’t attempt to develop this perspective here.
Class and the World Today
In its 2008/09 Global Wage Report, the International Labour Office (ILO) of the United Nations revealed that nearly half the world’s “employed” workforce worked for wages or salaries, rising from 43 percent in 1996 to 47 percent in 2006. This meant a shift of millions from either self-employment (peasants, independent artisans, peddlers, and others) or toward exclusion from the workforce. While not all waged workers are working class in the sense discussed above, most are. If we include dependents and the “reserve army” of labor (which would include many working as “self-employed”) this might well amount to a majority for the first time in history. This shift is uneven. As the ILO described it, “Paid employment appears to be growing everywhere (with the exception of Latin America) and has been expanding particularly rapidly in East Asia.”43
Thus,
