This notion, that the working class provides the agency that can change society, has been challenged even more than Marx's account of the economic dynamic of the system. Marx was a brilliant economist and a pioneering sociologist, the argument goes, but fell into an apocalyptic vision of the future which ascribed a metaphysical role to the working class. The spread of modern capitalism, the argument continues, has not been accompanied by the growth of the working class, the conditions of those workers that do exist have not been homogenised, and they do not develop a consciousness in opposition to the system.
Such contentions were already very widespread during the long post-war boom. As a notable sociological study of British workers told:
A major and recurrent theme-and most notably in liberal quarters-[ was] that of the incipient decline and decomposition of the working class. As the development of industrial societies continued, it was suggested, the working class, understood as a social stratum with its own distinctive ways of life, values and goals, would become increasingly eroded by the main currents of change. The very idea of a working class had been formed in, and in fact belonged to, the infancy of industrial society: in the era to come it would steadily lose its empirical referent. Social inequalities would no doubt persist; but these would be modified and structured in such a way that the society of the future would be an overwhelmingly "middle-class" society, within which the divisions of the past would no longer be recognisable.1
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The Runaway System