Filmer's.8 Anyone who believes we have said "farewell" to this class is not living in the real world.
Marx made a distinction between a class which exists in itself, as an objective element in the social structure, shaped by the relations of people to the means of making a livelihood, and a class for itself, with a consciousness of its position and of its interests in opposition to those of another class. The key conclusion to draw from all the figures is that the working class exists as never before as a class in itself, with a core of perhaps 2 billion people, or a third of the global population. On top of this there are very large numbers of peasants, up to 50 percent, who do some wage labour and so are subject to much of the same logic of the system as the workers. The global proletariat and semi-proletariat combined are the majority of the population for the first time in history.
But we need to go beyond these general figures if we are to grasp the potential for the world's workers to challenge the system. It is necessary first to look how changes in the system are changing different sectors of workers.
The "advanced" countries: the effects of restructuring
The repeated restructuring of production means that the working class in the advanced countries today is different in many respects to that 40 or 50 years ago. But this does not justify the claim that the working class has disappeared as a result of "deindustrialisation", the "post-industrial society", or the "weightless economy".
Take, for instance, the world's biggest single economy, that of the US. There was much panic about "deindustrialisation" in the 1980s in the face of challenges to US industrial pre-eminence in fields like car production and computers. But in 1998 the number of workers in industry was nearly 20 percent higher than in 1971, roughly 50 percent higher than in 1950 and nearly three times the level of 1900. Baldoz, Koeber and Kraft noted at the beginning of this century, "More Americans are now employed in making cars, buses and parts of them than at any time since the Vietnam War" .9
Even after the recession of 2001-2 had led to a massive rationalisation of industry, with the loss of about one in six manufacturing jobs, the industrial working class had far from disappeared. Industrial production in 2007 was 8 percent higher than in 2000 and 30 percent higher than in 1996,10 and the US remained the world's biggest single centre of manufacturing, with a fifth of world output (the combined old European Union of 15 states was ahead with a quarter),11 despite much talk of manufacturing moving to the Third World in its entirety.
332
The Runaway System