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# PostCapitalism-_Paul-Mason_-_z-library.sk_-1lib.sk_-z-lib.sk_
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or strong advocates of industrial unionism; the temper of the old crafts is monopolistic and conservative; that of the latter, propagandist and revolutionary.29
The skilled layer had, in other words, consistently moved beyond ‘pure trade unionism’. But at the same time they remained wary of those advocating all-or-nothing political revolution. Their objective was workplace control and the creation of a parallel society within capitalism.
For the next twenty years, these shop stewards would become the perennial floating voters of the far left – constantly searching for a third course between insurrection and reform. They understood (because they lived among them) that the majority of workers were not about to immediately embrace communism, that many Western societies had a political resilience unguessed at by Lenin, and that they, the militants, would need strategies to survive: to strengthen the autonomy of the working class, improve its culture and defend the gains already won.
The factional history of most communist parties in the inter-war years is of a recurrent clash between the Leninists, trying to force Moscow-inspired schemes, tactics and language on to these traditions, and the militant shop stewards trying to create an alternative society from within.
And here’s the kernel of truth contained in What Is to Be Done?. Lenin was wrong to say workers can’t spontaneously move beyond pure, reformoriented trade unionism. He was right to say revolutionary communism was not their spontaneous ideology. Their spontaneous ideology was about control, social solidarity, self-education and the creation of a parallel world.
But capitalism could not grant that: the third long cycle was about to swing downwards, and spectacularly. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, governments all over the world inflicted mass unemployment, welfare reductions and wage cuts on the working class. Where the stakes were highest, and the working class too strong, the ruling elites concluded it had to be smashed.
The stage was set for the decisive event of the 200-year history of organized labour: the destruction of the German workers’ movement by fascism. Nazism was German capitalism’s final solution to the power of organized labour: in 1933, unions were outlawed and socialist parties
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destroyed. Catastrophe followed in other countries. In 1934, the labour movement in Austria was crushed in a four-day civil war. Then in Spain, between 1936 and 1939, General Franco waged total war on organized labour and the radical peasantry, leaving 350,000 dead. In Greece, the Metaxas dictatorship of 1936 outlawed not just socialist parties and trade unions but even the folk music associated with working-class culture. The labour movement in Poland, Hungary and the Baltic states – including the massive Jewish labour movement – was first suppressed by right-wing governments and then wiped out during the Holocaust.
Only in three advanced economies did the labour organizations survive and grow in the 1930s: Britain and its Empire, France and the USA. In the latter two, the years 1936–7 saw a rash of factory occupations where the main issue was control.
The workers who fought fascism were the most class-conscious, selfsacrificing and highly educated generation in the entire 200-year history of the proletariat. But the first half of the twentieth century was the ultimate test bed for the Marxist theory of the working class – and it was disproven. Workers wanted something bigger than power; they wanted control. And the fourth long cycle would, for a time, provide it.
THE MASSACRE OF ILLUSIONS
In 2012, I went to a cemetery in Valencia to visit the mass graves of Franco’s victims. In the years after Franco’s fall, their families had erected small individual headstones containing sepia photographs of those murdered. When I tried to take a photo on my iPhone, the camera app recognized their faces as human, bracketing them with a small green square.
They were largely middle-aged men and women: councillors, lawyers, shopkeepers. Most of the younger men and women had been killed or executed on the battlefield. The mass graves were for those left over, shot by the truckload between 1939 – when the civil war ended – and 1953 when they ran out of people to murder.
George Orwell, who fought alongside them, was haunted by the idealism in these faces. They were, he wrote, ‘the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries … now, to the tune of several millions, rotting in forced-labour camps’.30 And that figure was not hyperbole. The Soviet gulag contained 1.4 million prisoners, about 200,000 of whom were killed each year. At least 6 million Jews were murdered in the Nazi concentration camps, and an estimated 3.3 million Russian prisoners of war died in German camps between 1941 and 1945. The Spanish war itself accounted for maybe 350,000 dead.31
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The scale of death during the Second World War makes it difficult to comprehend. So its impact on the politics and the sociology of the working class has been the subject of a horrified silence. But let us puncture it. The majority of the Jews killed in East Europe were from politicized workingclass communities. Many were adherents either of pro-Soviet, left Zionist parties or the anti-Zionist Bund. The Holocaust wiped out an entire political tradition in the global labour movement in the space of three years.
In Spain, the unions, co-ops and militias of the left were destroyed by mass murder – and their traditions suppressed until the 1970s. Meanwhile, in Russia the working-class political underground was exterminated by the gulag and mass executions.
What Orwell called ‘the flower of the European working class’ was crushed. Even if it had only been a question of numbers, this deliberate slaughter of politicized workers – added to the tens of millions of people killed by military action – would have been a turning point in the story of organized labour. But there was a massacre of illusions going on as well. As the Second World War approached, the extreme left – the Trotskyists and anarchists – tried to maintain the old, internationalist line: no support for wars between imperialist powers, keep the class struggle going at home. But by May 1940 the war was a bigger fact than the class struggle.
As the Allied powers collapsed, with significant pro-Nazi wings emerging among the ruling class in the Netherlands, France and Britain, it was clear to any working-class family with a radio that the very survival of their culture would rely on the military defeat of Germany. Working-class politics would become dependent on an Allied military victory. After the war, those who survived the slaughter, conscious of how close organized
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labour had come to total obliteration, now sought a strategic accommodation.
1948–89: WORK BECOMES ‘ABSURD’
The Second World War was punctuated by workers’ uprisings – but of a different type from those of 1917–21. Beginning with the Dutch general strike in 1941, and reaching a climax with the strikes that brought down Mussolini in 1943 and 44, these were anti-fascist actions, not primarily anticapitalist. Where workers’ uprisings threatened the Allied plans – as they did in both Warsaw and Turin in 1944 – generals simply halted the military advance until the Wehrmacht had done its job. After that, the communist parties stepped in to limit all action to the restoration of democracy only.
There was no repeat of 1917–21. But fears of such a repeat would force a hike in workers’ living standards and a tilt in the balance of wealth distribution towards the working class.
In the first phase, the rapid post-war expulsion of women from the industrial workforce – as depicted in the documentary film The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980) – allowed male wages to rise, causing a narrowing of wage differentials between workers and the middle class. The sociologist C. Wright Mills noted that, by 1948, while the income of American white-collar workers had doubled in ten years, that of manual workers had increased threefold.32
Additionally, the Allies actually imposed welfare states, trade union rights and democratic constitutions on Italy, Germany and Japan, as a punishment for their elites and as an obstacle to their re-emergence as fascist powers.
Demobilization saw the creation of a university-educated layer of working-class kids utilizing subsidized education. Policies pursued to promote full employment, together with the state-run labour exchanges, training boards and job demarcation rules further increased labour’s bargaining power. As a result, once growth took off in the 1950s, the wage share of GDP in most countries rose significantly above pre-war levels,
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while the tax take from the upper and middle classes also rose, to fund health and welfare programmes.
The trade-off? Workers abandoned the ideologies of resistance that had sustained them in the third long wave. Communism, social-democracy and trade unionism became – whatever the rhetoric said – ideologies of coexistence with capitalism. In many industries trade union leaders effectively became an arm of management.
This is where the living memory of today’s developed-world workers begins: with welfare, health, free education, public housing projects and with collective rights at work enshrined in law. During its upswing, the fourth long cycle would deliver material improvements previous generations could only dream of.
But for survivors of the pre-war period it was like waking up in a nightmare. In 1955, the US sociologist Daniel Bell argued that ‘the proletariat is being replaced by a salariat, with a consequent change in the psychology of the workers’. Noting the massive rise in white-collar workers compared to blue-collar workers, Bell – at this point a leftist – warned: ‘these salaried groups do not speak the language of labour. Nor can they be appealed to in the old class conscious terms.’33 The social theorist Herbert Marcuse concluded in 1961 that new technology, consumer goods and sexual liberation had decisively weakened the proletariat’s alienation from capitalism: ‘The new technological work-world thus enforces a weakening of the negative position of the working class: the latter no longer appears to be the living contradiction to the established society. ’34
In Italy, pioneering research by the shop-floor activist Romano Alquati discovered that new levels of workplace automation had left workers alienated from the factory as any kind of arena for political self-expression. For the generation that had overthrown Mussolini, the factories had been an iconic battlefield. But among the young, the word ‘absurd’ was the most common term used to describe the production process. They complained about a ‘sense of ridiculousness surrounding their lives’.35
The most tangible effect of this new sociology of work was the global decline in class-based voting patterns, famously illustrated in the Alford
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Index.36 Historian Eric Hobsbawm, surveying the process later, declared that ‘the forward march of labour’ was halted in the early 1950s. He cited the decline of a ‘common style of proletarian life’, the unprecedented rise in the number of women working and the replacement of large workplaces by an extended supply chain of smaller ones. Crucially, Hobsbawm noted that the new technologies of the 1950s and 60s had not only expanded the white-collar layer but had also decoupled high wages from manual skill. By taking on two jobs, working heavy overtime or outperforming in the piecework system, a semi-skilled worker could earn nearly as much as an experienced electrician or engineer.37
The combined impact of these changes was that, from the war until the late 1960s, workers’ struggles were, as Alquati complained, ‘always functional to the system. Always atomised, always blind.’38 Gorz wrote doomily that the post-war workplace ‘will never produce that working class culture, which together with a humanism of labour constituted the great utopia of the socialist and trade union movements up until the 1920s’.39
It is startling how many of the ‘working class decline’ theorists had personal experience of the movement at its pre-war peak. Marcuse had been elected to a soldiers’ soviet in Berlin in 1919; Hobsbawm joined the German communist party via its schoolchildren’s branch in 1932; Bell joined the Young Socialists in the New York slums in the same year; Gorz had witnessed the workers’ uprising in Vienna. Their disillusion was the product of long-term empirical knowledge.
Looking back we can see the changes they were responding to more clearly.
First, the working class expanded. Large numbers of the salariat were in fairly menial office jobs, getting lower pay than manual workers and subject to pointless discipline and routine. White-collar workers were definitely still workers. The level of their alienation was captured well by the popular novels of the 1950s: Billy Liar is an undertaker’s clerk; Joe Lampton in Room at the Top is an accountant at the local council.
Next, stratification altered the consciousness of this expanded working class. White-collar workers, even unionized or alienated ones, do not think or act like manual workers. And the young manual workers, themselves increasingly alienated from work and the culture surrounding it, also formulated a different kind of rebellious consciousness – as captured perfectly in another popular novel of the 1950s, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
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Access to consumer goods did not subdue militancy. It was a material change, but wholly containable within working-class culture. But automation triggered a long-term psychological change. If work seemed ‘absurd, ridiculous and boring’ to the Fiat workers Alquati interviewed in the early 1960s, there was a deeper reason. The automation levels of the time were crude, but advanced enough to illustrate what the future of work would be like. Though the actuality of a factory run by computer was decades away, and robotization even further, workers understood that these things were no longer science fiction but distinct possibilities. There would come a time when manual work was no longer necessary.
Subtly, the sense of what it meant to be ‘a worker’ changed. What united the young workers in the 1950s, Gorz believed, was their alienation from work: ‘In short, for the mass of workers it is no longer the power of the workers that constitutes the guiding utopia, but the possibility of ceasing to function as workers; the emphasis is less on liberation within work and more on liberation from work.’40
Strikes would happen among the expanded service proletariat once the crisis began in the late 1960s, but they almost never reached the levels of total shutdown possible in factories, ports and mines. When they did, these strikes escalated into confrontations with the state, which the majority of service workers were not prepared to see through to resolution.
The decline theorists were ill-fated. Daniel Bell became a neo-con. Marcuse, Mills and Gorz argued for a ‘New Left’ based on the struggles of oppressed groups, not the workers. That’s what we’ve ended up with – but only after two decades in which this new working class defied the decline theorists, staging an uprising that brought parts of the developed world close to chaos.
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We, the militants of the mid-1970s and 80s, derided those who had declared the old forms of working-class struggle dead, but it was they who had glimpsed the future.
1967–76: THE HOT DECADE
The years 1967–76 saw Western capitalism in crisis and wildcat strike action on an unprecedented scale. In spite of their cars, televisions, mortgages and expensive clothes, the workers took to the streets. Socialdemocratic parties veered to the left and revolutionary groups gained footholds in the factories, where they recruited thousands of members.
Among those in power, there were serious fears of a workers’ revolution; certainly in France and Italy – and, in their deepest nightmares, also Britain and the black cities of the USA. We know how it ended – with defeat and atomization – but to answer the question ‘why?’ I want to start with my own experience.
In 1980, the British TUC published a book of archive photographs.41 When I took it home and showed it to my grandmother, one photograph had her mesmerized and physically shaken. It showed a naked girl in a tin bathtub, sometime before 1914. ‘You don’t have to tell me about that,’ she said. ‘I lived three months through the ’26 strike and I got married in the ’21 strike.’ She had never before volunteered knowledge of these two big miners’ strikes, nor had she ever spoken about them to my father. The tin bath triggered the memory of poverty; the poverty triggered the memory of 1926, when a nine-day general strike turned into a three-month miners’ strike during which, as she now revealed, she had starved.
The entire pre-1939 period was a sealed box for her: extreme hardship, humiliation, violence, stillbirths, debt and two giant strikes that she had tried to forget. There was more to this than suppressed trauma. I became certain, as we leafed together through the photographs of hunger marches, barricades and occupied coal mines, that these images were more startling to her than they were to me.
Born in 1899, she had lived through two world wars, a Depression and the heyday of Hobsbawm’s ‘common proletarian life’. But beyond her own memories, she had no general knowledge of the events, nor understanding of their significance. Yet she was possessed with a compulsive ideology of rebellion. Class consciousness, for my grandmother, was formed out of experience alone: through talking, listening and seeing. Discussions at the pub, slogans chalked on the walls, actions taken. So separate were workingclass towns from the world in which newspapers were written, or radio bulletins made, that bourgeois ideology barely touched them.
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Logic and detail were important for practical things: how to prune roses, house-train a puppy, assemble a mortar shell (which she taught me at the age of five using one stolen from her wartime factory work). But class consciousness was sub-logical and implicit. It was conveyed through sayings, songs, sighs, body language and constant acts of micro-solidarity. It was a solidarity preserved over generations through industrial and geographic stability.
She knew her family history from the names in the back of her Bible, going back to 1770. They were all silk weavers or cotton weavers including her own unmarried mother. None of them had lived further than five miles from the place she was born. In her own life she moved house just three times, always within the same square mile.
So when sociologists ask how important the ‘common proletarian way of life’ and its physical geography were to class consciousness before 1945, my answer would be: decisive.
Though it felt to the young workers of the 1960s that they lived within a stable, 200-year-old culture, its foundations were shifting so rapidly that when they tried to pull the traditional levers of solidarity and struggle, in the 1970s and 80s they didn’t work.
The central change – as Richard Hoggart documented brilliantly in his 1957 study The Uses of Literacy – was the injection of formal knowledge into working class life: information, logic and the ability to question everything. Mental complexity was no longer the preserve of the Fabian schoolteacher or the communist agitator with his newspaper full of Moscow-speak. It was available to all.42
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For my father’s generation, knowledge arrived into the post-war working-class community not just through the expanded education system and the public library but through the television, the tabloid newspaper, the movie, the paperback book and the lyrics of popular songs, which sometime during the late 1950s began to take on the quality of working-class poetry.
And it was knowledge about a world that was suddenly complex. Social mobility increased. Geographical mobility increased. Sex – a taboo in the public discourse of the pre-war working class – was everywhere. And now, on the eve of the crisis, the biggest technological innovation of all was rolled out: the contraceptive pill, first prescribed in 1960 but mainly legalized for use by single women during the late 1960s and early 70s, producing what economists Akerlof, Yellen and Katz called a ‘reproductive technology shock’.43 Women surged into higher education: for example, 10 per cent of US law students in 1970 were female – this rose to 30 per cent ten years later. And with control over the timing of childbirth, the stage was set for a decisive increase in female participation in the workforce.44
In sum, what emerged was a new kind of worker. The generation that would wage class war in the 1970s began with higher incomes, higher levels of personal freedom, fragmenting social ties and much better access to information. Contrary to the decline theorists’ beliefs, none of this would stand in the way of them fighting. But here is why, ultimately, they lost.
The post-industrial, free-market model which destroyed their economic power and the traditional narrative based around work had collapsed. A new capitalist strategy had emerged. There was also the emergence of a new kind of rebel consciousness, which was no longer negative, spontaneous or uninformed, but based on formal knowledge and more reliant on elitecontrolled channels of mass communication. On top of this, we have to factor in the dead weight of both Stalinism and social-democracy, which worked virtually full-time during the 1970s upsurge to channel the class struggle into compromise and parliamentary politics. Finally, workers were held back by the knowledge that the revolutions of the 1920s and 30s had failed, and that fascism was beaten only with the help of democratic capitalism.
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