that explicitly rejects capitalism in political and ideological terms. Such resistance or disillusionment occurs as a result of the material impact—on those who, because of their class position, have no alternative—of the contradictions operating within capitalist production.
Many of these are expressed in the collapse of the mythical 1980s “prosperity” of Thatcherism, swallowed whole by British “New Times” discourse theorists but cruelly undercut for workers by factors that were starkly, non-“hegemonicalIy” economic. A 1992 study of British workers in the same “Reagan Democrat” social stratum as those in Croteau’s research (known as “C2s” from their position in British socioeconomic census categories) sheds light on the essential instability of skilled workers’ adherence to the “hegemony” of the Thatcher years.24 Rather than the “prosperity” and individualist “consumerism” emphasized in postmodernist analysis,25 the overwhelming message that emerges from this research is one of widespread, and growing, economic insecurity. Respondents’ “perceptions” were only too well-founded on direct experience of layoffs, short-term contracts, house repossessions, and the joblessness of their teenage children. The sense of insecurity and demoralization conveyed in the words of these erstwhile working-class Tories—“We are now going backwards . . . struggling to survive”; “There’s always that fear at the back of my mind”; “It’s dire—we’ve hit the bottom and can’t go any further”—is potent testimony to the lack of permanence of apparently impregnable hegemonic structures. Disillusionment with Thatcher’s “property-owning democracy,” once acclaimed as the pinnacle of a new culture of “individual aspiration,” is compounded by the massive intensification of labor, alongside pay freezes and other pressures on living standards, experienced by those lucky enough to retain “core” employment.26
But there is another side to the coin of this bewildered demoralization—the propensity of such economic factors to propel even the ideologically conservative “C2s” into action, which challenges both capitalist production relations and the state. The relatively well-paid and secure workers who, in addition to the much-vaunted “self-employed,” made up the subjects of the 1992 study were from the same stratum as those workers involved in key antiemployer struggles during the worst years of Thatcherism. The printworkers who fought the savage anti-Murdoch struggles at Wapping would fall almost entirely into the category hailed by postmodernist writers as swallowing whole the “consumerist” bait of Thatcherism, as would Ford workers at Dagenham, who staged a significant strike in the late 1980s that revealed the vulnerability of “just-in-time” work arrangements. Many of the ambulance workers who took part in the protracted national dispute of 1989 were characteristic South-Eastern “Tory waverers.”27
While the “Reagan Democrats” and “C2s” of our analysis so far, as predominantly white and (at least traditionally) “privileged” workers, are generally presumed to be the most socially and politically conservative, the absence of coherent ideology and the presence of contradictory ideas are by no means exclusive to this stratum. In the face of very real fears of detention and/or deportation, immigrant workers such as farm laborers around the United States and Latino construction workers in Southern California have rebelled against their working conditions despite holding socially conservative ideas on reproductive rights, “family values,” and other “hot-button” issues. The point, however, is the same; struggles and confrontations based in class experience are seldom preceded by ideological clarity or “political correctness.” If anything, it is the struggle that opens the way to new ideas and ways of viewing the world.
The lesson to be drawn would seem to be that no amount of conservative social ideology in the heads of workers is, ultimately, proof against their intermittent propulsion in an entirely different, and contradictory, direction. Yet it is the economic circumstances of these workers, rather than their initial consciousness, that propel them into resistance with the potential to challenge some of their most basic assumptions about the nature of the world. In this sense the struggle is not chosen, but neither is it, in certain circumstances, avoidable. Ideology may have lifted these workers out of their actual position in capitalist production relations; economic contradictions put them firmly back again.
Our focus on working-class consciousness or “common sense” in terms of an absence of ideology, a “pragmatic acceptance” of existing structures in contrast to any more positive endorsement of ruling-class ideology, needs to be complemented by a recognition of the impressive capacity of basic economic struggles for opening up, as it were, an “epistemological break” in working-class consciousness. This has been testified to over and over, from the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, sparked by a dispute over compositors’ piece rates, to late-twentieth-century class insights gained by Midwestern American workers through their involvement in struggles such as the strikes and lockouts at A. E. Staley in Decatur, Illinois, the Detroit newspapers, and elsewhere.28
For well over a decade, a new “common situation” (to borrow Marx’s phrase in describing the formation of the early working class) has been experienced by ever-wider sections of workers in both industrial and semiindustrial nations through drastic upheavals in the organization of work, labor markets, and even capital itself. Mergers, acquisitions, and transnationalization have produced ever more universal and visible organizations of capital. On the other hand, downsizing, contracting out, work intensification, and generally “lean” norms of work organization now affect most working-class people directly or indirectly across the world.29
This “common situation” has had its impact in a measurable rise in class consciousness. A recent British survey showed the proportion assenting to the question “Do you think there is a class struggle?” rising from 48 percent in 1964 to 81 percent in 1995.30 In the United States, the attitude toward strikes appears to have changed dramatically. While a 1984 poll showed that 45 percent of those questioned about strike situations supported management and 34 percent the strikers, in 1996 a nearly identical poll found a reversal of opinion as 46 percent sided with strikers and only 25 percent with management. More specifically, the recent wave of strikes at General Motors plants and, above all, the 1997 strike by 185,000 Teamsters against the United Parcel Service (UPS), gained majority “public” support as more and more working people saw themselves in the same situation; polls indicated that 55 percent were for the UPS strikers and 27 percent for management. The fight for full-time jobs had become a social issue for much of the working class.
Conflicting Ideologies
The story behind the successful fifteen-day strike at UPS in August 1997 provides an almost laboratory-style example of the impotence of explicit capitalist ideology in one of its most contemporary and “hegemonic” forms—when the company launched a concerted ideological offensive in preparation for 1997 collective bargaining—and, in contrast, of the impact of an alternative agenda of ideas and organization among rank-and-file activists.
The UPS workforce includes just about every level of the working class. The drivers, although not exclusively white or even male, are among the highly paid full-time workers described as “Reagan Democrats” or “C2s,” while the sorters and loaders are racially diverse, mostly part-time, and fairly low-paid. The company believed that unity among these workers would collapse in the event of a strike and large numbers of part-timers would cross the picket lines. What happened was the opposite. The strike was characterized by high levels of participation and mobilization and a unity the company could not comprehend.
In the two years preceding the strike, the company mounted an ideological offensive meant to assure that disunity would be the order of the day. In 1995 they launched a new team concept program, which like all such programs was meant to win key sections of workers over to the company’s ideology of “competitive” goals—or at least to promote internalization of this piece of up-to-date bourgeois ideology among enough workers to head off an effective strike. The company overestimated the degree to which UPS workers would buy into this view of the world and of the company because it underestimated a process that had gone on among these workers for years—specifically, the long-term role of the Teamsters for a Democratic
