The slave is not a proletarian; the proletarian is not a slave. For, under capitalism the dual freedom of the worker consists of her freedom from the means of production, and her freedom to sell her labour power to any buyer. The slave lacks both freedoms.  It follows that slavery and capitalism are incompatible.  What could be more straightforward than that?  Daniel Gaido points out, in a marxist historiograpical treatise on American capitalism, that this focus on the mode of exploitation involved in any mode of production is one that distinguishes marxism from bourgeois political economy.  For the latter, exchange relations are far more central.  Slavery is thus often (not always) defined as capitalist on account of its integration into commodity exchange.  For marxists, this is to focus on one small aspect of the totality of productive relations, which omits the social role of the worker and the relation of exploitation between owner and labourer.  This latter, Marx sees as central:

So, to repeat: the mode of exploitation comprising the innermost secret of the whole social formation, slave labour would seem to be a form of surplus extraction that belongs solely and exclusively to pre-capitalist modes of production (PCMPs).  Yet, of course, there is a tradition in marxist thought, which owes as much to W E B Du Bois as to Eric Williams, which sees plantation slavery as a capitalist form.  Contemporary advocates of this view would include David Roediger, for example.  In a classic essay, Sidney Mintz made what is in my view a compelling argument for not treating the issue of 'free labour' as decisive.  Wage labour is, like exchange relations, only one element in the totality of capitalist social relations, and has precedents in PCMPs.  I will return to Mintz's argument, but its polemical thrust is directed against the idea of slavery as the eternal other of capitalism.  Naturally, I have my view on the debate over slavery and capitalism which will become obvious throughout the post.  And for what it's worth, the latest issue of Historical Materialism carries a symposium on slavery, capitalism and the US Civil War, with contributions from Robin Blackburn, Eric Foner and others, which is mandatory reading on the subject.  But what I'm most interested in is trying to clarify the ways in which one would approach the issue, and attempt to resolve it.

First of all, it seems to me that the subject is modes of production, and the relations between them.  What does a 'mode of production' specify?  The mode of production consists of a conjunction of relations of production and forces of production.  This much at least is uncontroversial among marxists.  But precisely what each element of this conjunction consists of is a matter of intense, complex argument.  We have said that the mode of exploitation constitutes the inner secret of a social formation.  But Jairus Banaji in his recent collection, Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation, has a point when he complains of a tendency to conflate productive relations with modes of exploitation.  So, for the purposes of this argument, he insists on the distinction between slavery as a mode of exploitation, and the slave mode of production.  Not making this distinction, he argues, leads to the erroneous tendency to assume that wherever slavery exists there is a slave mode of production; and, as a corollary, it is assumed that wherever labour is 'unfree', there can be no capitalist mode of production (CMP).

In an enlightening essay, Banaji goes on to interrogate the notion of 'free labour'.  The idea of 'free labour' rests on a certain legal formalism in which 'free will' is assumed in the absence of direct political coercion, it logically leads to absurdities such as the assertion by US courts that "a servitude which was knowingly and willingly entered into could not be termed involuntary".  The point is not simply that behind formal legal freedom exists a realm of economic coercion; rather, it is that it is incoherent to speak of a free contract, particularly under capitalism where bargaining outcomes are determined by the wider politico-legal structure upheld through coercion.  The line between free and unfree labour is impossible to draw without collapsing into liberal mystification.  There are various kinds of labour which might be compatible with capitalism - debt-bound labour, hired labour, waged labour, etc - and in each case there are various mechanisms by which labour is subjected and unfree.

Just as much a source of controversy as the content of each element of the mode of production is the relation between the elements, eg whether the dynamic historical element in the mode of production is the forces or relations of production.  I won't go into this controversy here, but I have some sympathy with the argument that prioritising productive forces tends to collapse into a kind of techno-determinism.  Then there is the question of whether the concept of a mode of production needs to specify additional elements: should it, for example, specify the means of its own reproduction?   I don't think it has to, necessarily, but for a rigorous discussion of this and related questions, you should read Harold Wolpe's introductory essay in The Articulation of Modes of Production. 

With those questions still in mind, it becomes necessary to resolve exactly what the CMP is, and how does it relate to PCMPs?  When capitalism emerges, does it instantaneously obliterate PCMPs, gradually subsume them, incorporate elements of the old into the new, remain constrained by them in various ways... or what?  When we speak of "uneven and combined development" in relation to the development of capitalism, we mean that capitalism develops independently in a number of territories, but not in complete separation; and that it develops at a different pace in each zone.  The concept helps explain certain concrete effects in terms of class formations, national politics and culture, but it also implies something else.  It implies unevenness of development and a combination of different levels of development of capitalism in relation to PCMPs.  

To put this in a more concrete way, how might we understand the position of slavery in a capitalist social formation?  Must we see it as apart from capitalism, a PCMP in its midst?  Alternatively is it possible to think of slavery as a remnant of a PCMP that has been annexed by the CMP? Or is slave labour simply one mode of exploitation that is perfectly compatible with capitalism?  Not a remnant of a PCMP but simply one of the many ways in which the capital-labour relation can be expressed?  Returning to Mintz's argument, what he shows in his detailed survey of plantation slavery is the co-existence of capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of labour not only in the same social formations, but often in the same sites of production; the same labourer could be both a slave and a proletarian.  From a very different position, Charles Post has made a strong case for seeing the cotton plantations in antebellum slavery as non-capitalist on the grounds of their lack of development of the means of production, low productivity and tendency to expand surplus value by crude absolute means such as territorial expansion: this clearly showed that pre-capitalist rather than capitalist imperatives were operative in antebellum slavery.  But as far as I can gather, the evidence on this is mixed depending on which sector of production you are looking at - for example, it depends on whether you are surveying evidence from cotton plantations, or from sugar plantations.  This would imply, perhaps, that different imperatives operated within the same regional system, that different modes of production were articulated together under a wider capitalist dominance.

Much hinges here on the distinction (derided as positivist by Banaji for reasons I don't follow) between the mode of production, and the social formation.  This is principally a distinction between different levels of abstraction.  The mode of production is an abstract set of determinations, whereas the social formation is the concrete site on which the mode of production is realised.  As such, or so Althusser and his followers would argue, one should expect to find an articulation of distinct 'pure' modes of production in any given formation.  And if that is correct, then it would be sensible to expect both capitalist and non-capitalist forms to co-exist in various complex ways; to mutually determine and restrict one another's formation and development; and when capitalism eventually triumphs, it would tend to have incorporate elements, remnants of precapitalist modes that are perhaps useful to its reproduction either at a political, ideological or economic level.

For Marx himself, the task of scientific history consisted in the determination of the laws regulating the movement of different epochs of history, their ‘laws of motion’ as they were called after the example of the natural sciences. Vulgar Marxism abdicated this task for a less ambitious programme of verifying ‘laws’ already implicit, as it supposed, in the materialist conception of history. ... Marx had been emphatic that abstract laws do not exist in history, that the laws of motion which operate in history are historically determinate laws. He indicated thereby that the scientific conception of history could be concretised only through the process of establishing these laws, specific to each epoch, and their corresponding categories. In other terms, through a process of producing concepts on the same level of historical ‘concreteness’ as the concepts of ‘value’, ‘capital’ and ‘commodity-fetishism’.

Greek austerity plans "threaten growth", they say.  They go on to add that "The economy is forecast to shrink by 5.5 per cent this year, and a further 2.5 per cent in 2012, bringing the total contraction since 2008 to 14 per cent."  There is no growth to threaten.  That is why Greece is on the brink.  That is why the state is dysfunctional, with ministers and international financial inspectors locked out of government offices by striking civil servants.  That is why the government fears "complete lawlessness" as the state's capacities disintegrate in several ways.  That is why new forms of militancy have emerged, with struggle committees arising to express the popular goals.  That is why the whole infrastructure is shut down in major and small ways every day by strikes and protests.  That is why the "mother of all strikes" is shutting Athens down.

Of course, the resistance is very exciting, but the level of resistance and upheaval is proportionate to the level of social distress.  A constellation of capitalist powers, from the banks to the IMF, EU, European Central Bank, and the government itself, are putting the Greek working class through an incredible trauma.  On every possible index, from wages to poverty, unemployment, working conditions and health, they are being put through the grinder.  Living standards have taken an unprecedented plunge.  And every time the austerity measures produce a renewed contraction, and make it impossible for the debts to be repaid, the banks come back for more, demanding further austerity and more bailouts for financial corporations.  They don't care how much suffering it causes.  This is mainly because it is an imperative for the major European banks to retain solvency and keep the Euro afloat as a global currency.  This is also an imperative for large sectors of European capital, in whose interests the EU has been constructed.  If the problem is insoluble on capitalist terms, and if there isn't going to be a renewed wave of capitalist growth, then I think the 1% would sooner take as much as possible and wait in their fortressed enclaves for the deluge to hit the 99%.  

It's not just Greece.  The reason we have seen a global movement erupt is because capitalism is an international system, and it's doing the same thing to all of us, everywhere.  What was done to the Third World in terms of structural adjustment is now being done to the working classes in advanced capitalist societies.  What is being done to Greece is being rolled out across Europe.  This means that what happens in Greece, as a weak link in the capitalist chain, is of incredible importance to what happens to us.  There is no immediate happy ending in sight.  Whether the Greek government forces through austerity, or is compelled to withdraw from the Eurozone and default on its debts, things are going to be very difficult.  As long as Greece is subordinated to the logic of capitalism, it is faced with a choice of evils.  

This is one of the reasons that, while there is a very powerful mass movement, it is not yet united around a clear alternative.  The idea of default and withdrawal from the Euro is advanced by many on the Left, who point out that the EU system is exploitative of peripheral countries, and that the most predatory lending and austerity measures are being forced on Greece by European institutions far more than by the IMF.  Germany in particular hopes to become, as Costas Lapavitsas puts it in his recent Socialist Register article, "undisputed master of European capitalism" as a result of the crisis.  But social democracy across the continent is placing its hopes in a 'good euro'.  These formations exert a gravitational pull on other left parties as well as the union bureaucracy.  Radicals to the left of social democracy, such as French economist Michael Husson (quoted here), argue that default and withdrawal by itself would not shift the balance of forces in favour of workers, pointing to the example of British capitalism which is outside the Eurozone.  While there's an element of truth in this, it ignores the core/periphery relationship, wherein Greek subordination within the EU is a major factor in its austerity drive and in intensifying the exploitation of Greek workers in general.  And since it is increasingly unlikely that default will be avoided, it is crucial that there is a leftist pressure to ensure it happens on terms that are relatively beneficial to the working class.  Above all, though, there needs to be a response to austerity at the continental level.  Lapavitsas argues that "working people in both core and periphery have no stake in the success of the EMU", and that radical left strategy across Europe should be based on this understanding.  This would involve different concrete proposals in each country, as the precise forms of exploitation differ in each case.  In Germany, the focus should be on raising domestic demand, breaking wage restraint and moving away from an export-led economy.  In the peripheral countries, it should be on finding radical ways of dealing with the debt/deficit burden.  But the social forces assembled behind this should also operate at a pan-European level: a Europe-wide general strike, coupled with a political campaign for a social Europe involving the left parties - the Portguese Left Bloc, Die Linke, NPA, etc. - is surely the minimum plausible response.

Things are moving very fast, and in such circumstances of organic crisis, as Gramsci reminds us, the troops of many different parties can suddenly pass under the banner of one party that better represents their interests.  The left parties have been gaining spectacularly, even if they remain divided, and even if the bureaucratic, parliamentarist and Stalinist elements have arguably held the struggle back in various ways.  Yes, the ruling class has its trained cadres, and changes its personnel and programmes much faster than opponents.  It is highly adaptible.  Just look at the way "corporate leaders say they understand protests".  Look at the way New Democracy are trying to capitalise on the government's woes; if social democracy has lost its ability to achieve austerity through bargaining, the ruling class will just turn to the Tories to use the whip instead.  But in such times, the ruling class can also lose the capacity for initiative.  It can make catastrophic mis-calculations, attack at the wrong moment, lose the loyalty of sections of its repressive apparatus. 

The situation is extraordinarily precarious.  It's important to remember that even amid the confidence and optimism of militant struggle, social misery of the kind Greece is going through also produces enormous despair.  And ruling classes have always been able to benefit from the disruption caused by strikes.  A serious setback for the struggle would be toxic, strengthening those who want to blame the strikes for the misery, and even worse those who want to scapegoat and terrorise immigrants, Muslims and the oppressed.  At the moment, even the lower middle class are effectively on strike.  Tax collectors aren't collecting taxes; and small businesses aren't paying VAT.  If it isn't the 99%, it's at least the 80%.  (Though, as is reported today, 99% of Greek small businesses and shops are closed for the strike.)  Their success now depends entirely on how those forces are placed, politically and strategically.

I spoke at a packed meeting at the 6 Billion Ways event today, on the subject of class and capitalism and their relevance to politics today. The socialist geographer Dorren Massey was, I think, the crowd favourite, not least for her note perfect impression of Ken Livingstone and her witty and detailed analysis of global capitalism and the effects of financialisation. Anthony Painter was representing for social democracy, I think. Though he accepted that class profoundly shapes people's life chances he is, as he said, more of a Weberian than a Marxist. He was sceptical of the analytical language of socialist critique, which he regarded as alienating, arguing that it was necessary to reach people emotionally. Phil McLeish drew on his experience of Reclaim the Streets and Climate Camp, arguing that it's more effective not to try to talk about capitalism directly, but to isolate processes within capitalism which one can directly mobilise against and have an alternative to. This is the speech which I hastily edited and cut down to a ten or fifteen minutes spiel. Much of it will be familiar to you:

The starting point for this discussion appears to be the question of whether a surfeit of single issue campaigns over specific problems is adequate in itself, or whether these need to be integrated into a broader analytical and practical framework addressed to recognising, opposing and eventually surpassing capitalism. Further, it seems to ask if class can be the concept, or antagonism, around which all of these seemingly distinct struggles can be organised.

First of all, I’ll try to say a bit about what I think class is, and how it relates to capitalism, because I think there’s a real mess of confusing and intimidating conceptions of class out there in the media. These often take class as a kind of status, based on levels of education and the prestige of one’s occupation – this is the version of class that is embedded in ‘social class’ statistics used by most pollsters and market research agencies - or a caste like nobility, or a pseudo-ethnicity, hence the ‘white working class’, a tea-towel memory of the sorts of communities that once exists in some form in the East End and elsewhere. Nor is it improved much by simply talking of class in terms of income distribution. We’re used to the usual shocking statistics concerning income distribution. I’ll cite some here.

In 2009, there were 10 million ‘high net worth individuals’, owning at least $1m in liquid assets – not illiquid assets like housing or cars – which comprises about 0.014% of the population. In the same year, ultra-high net worth individuals, owning at least $30m in liquid wealth comprised 36,000 people, or about 0.0005% of the world’s population. The total wealth held by all high net work individuals was $39 trillion, equivalent to about two thirds of global GDP in the same year. Another way to look at this is that increase in wealth held by this layer between 2008 and 2009 was $6 trillion, equivalent to approximately 10% of world GDP in that year. Now, if we just stopped there, we wouldn’t necessarily have come to an understanding of class. This would tell us about the assets that different actors could bring to bear in the market, and the rewards that they could generate from doing so, but that doesn’t automatically conduce to an argument about class. Perhaps another method will be hinted if I point out that in the UK, between mid-2009 and early 2010, some 89% of all new income produced went to profits – of £27bn produced, £24bn went to profits, and only £2bn went to wages. Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, recently estimated that a combination of factors was producing a steep fall in the value of real wages, such that wages in 2011 would be at best no higher than in 2005. This was the first time since the 1920s that real wages had fallen over a six year period. So, that’s telling us something not only about the distribution of wealth, but about the distribution of wealth as a social product – ie as something that we all produce through our labour – as a result of the operations of a capitalist economy. In fact, one could go further: the share of GDP that goes to wages fell between 1974 and 2010 from 64% to 54%, a ten percent reduction.

Amid a revival of Marx in some quarters, I want to outline the approach that Marx offered to understanding how this works. For Marx, class was not best understood in a static way, by looking at hierarchies and income distributions. Rather, to find class, you had to look at the system as a whole and its evolution, or more particularly, its reproduction. And if you start by looking at how different actors contribute to the reproduction of the system, the existing relations of production as it were, you’ll understand the class system. Here’s a schematic way of approaching this. If you’re a wage labourer, you reproduce the system by selling your labour power as a commodity to a capitalist, someone who owns some means of production, and allowing them to extract a surplus from the exchange – a profit. Unless you subscribe to the ‘golden egg’ theory, a form of magical thinking integral to capitalism, the profit can come from nowhere other than your labour. If you’re a capitalist, you reproduce the system by purchasing capital assets, bringing them together with labour which you also purchase, and taking the commodities thereby produced to sell on the market. If you’re a successful capitalist, you’ll realise a greater share of the surplus produced than if you’re not. But if you just take the money you make, decline to invest it in new production, instead spend on having a good time, going bungee jumping and parachuting like some California teenager, you’re no longer a capitalist. You’re only a capitalist for as long as you’re putting your money into circulation as capital, in order to generate a surplus.

The conflict between these two groups, over the precise way in which surplus will be extracted, and the extent of that surplus, as opposed to wages, is the central conflict in capitalism which one might call ‘class struggle’.

But of course there are middling layers who perform various roughly equivalent roles in the reproduction of the system, who collectively comprise the middle class. You have middle and junior managers, professionals, small businessmen and lone traders. Together these comprise perhaps 20% of the total workforce – a controversial claim, perhaps, when we’re constantly told that we’re all middle class now, even though polls indicate that most of us don’t think of ourselves as such. The ‘old middle class’ mainly comprised small producers and professionals, but this has been in decline for some time, partly because of the concentration of capital, and partly because formerly professional occupations have been proletarianised; the ‘new middle class’ that arose in the mid-to-late twentieth century is just that apparatus of supervisors and managers who were basically built up to contain labour militancy and roll out greater discipline and productivity on the shop floor. They wield surrogate authority on behalf of the owners, just as professionals wield a broader authority in society, contributing to the reproduction of its dominant relations of production and divisions of labour. They’re not simply part of the capitalist class, and profits don’t make up the greater share of their income. But nor are their interests identical with workers, so in this sense they’re middle class and thus susceptible to varying alliances. In the past, professionals were overwhelmingly politically conservative; these days the majority are either Liberal or Labour. On the other hand, the lower middle class, small businessmen and so on, are overwhelmingly Conservative – this group formed the backbone of Thatcher’s electoral base in the 1980s, consistently giving her about 70% of their votes.

Well, the above is just an argument about how we can approach class and its wider relevance to social divisions and thus to politics, but we seem to need something else. Since we’re interested in questions of left-wing political formations, of how our campaigns can win wider support by being plugged into an overarching political framework, we have to find ways to concretely address the issue of how we relate to class antagonisms. There are different ways to operate on these, and you can see contrasting examples in the Labour Party. Phil Woolas, supported by the usual cortege of New Labour ideologues, thought that the best way to do this was to appeal to racism, social authoritarianism – his first election campaign was mounted on the basis of scaremongering about his Liberal opponent’s relaxed stance on drugs – and a politics of resentment, in which he claimed that the main form of racism in Oldham was anti-white racism. What he was trying to do was bring together socially conservative working class votes with economically liberal middle class votes, and build a coalition that way. It’s a microcosm of the New Labour approach which, though it lost 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010, mostly working class and mostly under Blair’s watch, the basic idea of electoral coalition building, mobilise fractions of different classes into a viable electoral constituency, is a basic component of any political strategy.

The basis on which one does so depends, however, on national, regional, local, ethnic and religious contexts. This recalls Marx’s conceptual distinction between the base and the superstructure – the base comprising the aggregate relations of production, and the superstructure comprising, ideological, political and legal relations which give shape to and organise the base. This is rather important – ideologies and identities and so on aren’t merely so much vapour that will be dispelled as soon as the real core of class antagonism asserts itself. Rather, they are formative, they determine to a large extent how class is experienced. I’ll give you an example. The monarchy sits at the apex of a caste of viscounts, military commanders, dames, duchesses, barons, baronesses, knights, clerics and so on. Its relation to the productive system itself is tentative – I mean, the royal family runs successful businesses, but that’s secondary to their role. What the royals do is uphold a caste within the capitalist class, a system based on ‘honour’ – and popular conceptions of ‘honour’ aren’t really important here, we’re talking about gradations within elites, within the ruling class. Now this caste is based to a considerable extent on the history of imperialism, and its relation to today’s Commonwealth, which gives ideological shape to the global position of British capitalism. And it upholds an idea of Britishness that, while a recent invention, has the appearance of longevity and stability. It says, there will be wars and recessions, turmoil and strife, but the firm lives on. Britain lives on. And no good bourgeois wants to go to his grave without having been admitted to that noble caste. Give a CBI member a knighthood, and he will consider himself to have truly lived.

For those of us who work for a living, there are all sorts of other divisions, gradations, and so on, based on occupation, region, religion, ‘race’, gender, sexuality and so on. These differences structure our life chances and our experiences. Now if you take a campaign like Unite Against Fascism, and its sister Love Music Hate Racism. These are single issue campaigns, but they somehow resonate beyond their borders. What they do is operate on a concrete lived experience of multiculture – people who are already living in a hybrid, inter-faith, inter-racial, even inter-national situation, whose life experiences don’t conform to those of a pure white Englishness or Britishness, whose idea of culture is of a dynamic process in which we’re all involved rather than a series of competing blocs. And it seeks to say that this is a far more valuable and vital form of life than the sterile integrationist models of culture in which we’re all supposed to have the same basic values as David Cameron, or Richard Desmond or Her Majesty. In doing so, it’s intervening largely in areas where there has been industrial decay, where there’s a breakdown in employment and trade union organisation and a widespread insecurity that is causing some layers of the population to hark back to a ‘respectable’, stable Britain in which culture seemed uncomplicated and innocent, in which there was public order and discipline in schools, and so on. Such campaigns help the Left by preventing the Right from using racism and insecurity to build a wider hegemonic bloc, preventing them from incorporating new layers of, say, working class voters into their traditional mobilising base. And it also says that there are real issues of social justice and class antagonisms that are being avoided when people talk about race and culture. You can argue about how successful it has been, and I would say it has acted as a retardant, but the point is that this single issue campaign has wider ramifications for where society is going.

So, there are two key ways to relate single issue campaigns to a wider social framework, and that is first to have some sort of analysis of the situation in which you’re working – even if you the campaign isn’t avowedly anticapitalist, it always helps I think to be aware of the ways in which capitalism is shaping the terrain in which these issues arise and often producing them very directly. I don’t think you can talk about the ecological death-trap intelligently without somehow broaching the subject of capitalism, and class. Secondly, one has to be aware of how class and its various lived modalities is shaping receptions of your campaign. Even if you’re not going to say ‘this is a working class campaign’, which in many cases wouldn’t be appropriate, you are trying to work within class divisions to assemble a potentially counter-hegemonic bloc. And you also lastly have to be aware of ruling class capacities. The capitalist class is not a conspiracy or a unified social layer – it’s deeply divided. There are fractions of capital, and within those fractions there will be daily disagreements over proper strategies, as well as conflicting interests. But the ruling class does have some advantages. First of all, it is more cohesive than other classes: the sociologist Michael Useem referred in the 1980s to an ‘interlocking directorate’ – different companies would send upwardly mobile executives to sit on the boards of other companies – which provided the basis for a certain class-wide perspective and for political mobilisation. And business political mobilisation is a huge problem for any left-wing campaign. But it also has the state. The state isn’t just an instrument for the ruling class. Obviously, divisions among the ruling class don’t produce any single use to which such an instrument would be put. But while there are many capitalists, there is only one state, and what the state does is provide a certain amount of unity and cohesion to that class, partly by allowing a segment of capital to acquire hegemony, consensual direction over other fractions of capital, and impregnating the state with its imperatives and motives, and partly by placing statesmen and intellectuals in a position to give ideological direction to the capitalist class. As such, you end up with a state that almost invariably maintains, and furthers, the dominant relations of production, meaning that the state will usually not be on your side if you want to somehow curtail capitalist interests.

Those are some of the ways in which capitalism and class should shape our appreciation of political campaigns.

***

As usual in these events, the discussion afterward was far better than the talks, ranging from Egypt to the cuts, Wisconsin, Ken Livingstone and the Olympics, the politics of climate change, the wage labour relation, and so on.

The annual Merrill Lynch Cap Gemini World Wealth Report is a serious study of liquid, investable wealth held by the richest people on the planet: the High Net Worth Individuals who have at least $1m liquid wealth, and the Ultra High Net Worth Individuals who have at least $30m, both "excluding primary residence, collectibles, consumables, and consumer durables". As such it constitutes an invaluable starting point for understanding who the ruling class are, where they live and how they hold their wealth. This is from the 2010 wealth report (I'm afraid there doesn't appear to be a working online file):

The world’s population of high net worth individuals (HNWIs) grew 17.1% to 10.0 million in 2009, returning to levels last seen in 2007 despite the contraction in world gross domestic product (GDP). Global HNWI wealth similarly recovered, rising 18.9% to US$39.0 trillion, with HNWI wealth in Asia-Pacific and Latin America actually surpassing levels last seen at the end of 2007.

For the first time ever, the size of the HNWI population in Asia-Pacific was as large as that of Europe (at 3.0 million). This shift in the rankings occurred because HNWI gains in Europe, while sizeable, were far less than those in Asia-Pacific, where the region’s economies saw continued robust growth in both economic and market drivers of wealth.

The wealth of Asia-Pacific HNWIs stood at US$9.7 trillion by the end of 2009, up 30.9%, and above the US$9.5 trillion in wealth held by Europe’s HNWIs. Among Asia-Pacific markets, Hong Kong and India led the pack, rebounding from mammoth declines in their HNWI bases and wealth in 2008 amid an outsized resurgence in their stock markets.

The global HNWI population nevertheless remains highly concentrated. The U.S., Japan and Germany still accounted for 53.5% of the world’s HNWI population at the end of 2009, down only slightly from 54.0% in 2008. Australia became the tenth largest home to HNWIs, after overtaking Brazil, due to a considerable rebound.

After losing 24.0% in 2008, Ultra-HNWIs saw wealth rebound 21.5% in 2009. At the end of 2009, Ultra-HNWIs accounted for 35.5% of global HNWI wealth, up from 34.7%, while representing only 0.9% of the global HNWI population, the same as in 2008.

The total liquid wealth of the rich in 2009, at $39 trillion, was actually more than two-thirds of world GDP in the same year, almost triple the GDP of the US, and nearly ten times that of China. Another way of looking at it is that the increase in liquid assets from 2008 to 2009 held by the rich was about $6.5 trillion, more than 10% of total GDP in 2009. This was in a year in which world GDP actually shrank by 0.8%.

The distinction between "economic and market drivers of wealth" is very important, and very telling. Most of the new wealth held by the rich was, as you can see, not produced by economic growth, but by stock market capitalisation. In other words, market relations, sustained by state intervention, facilitated the transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich at a time when most of the world's economy was such that the direct exploitation of labour could not sustain high profit rates. That's what the bail-outs did; it's what they were intended to do. Another intended consequence is that there were not only more high net worth individuals, 10 million of them globally (0.014% of the world's population), but the 'ultras' did far better at increasing their share of liquid assets than mere millionaires - thus wealth became even more concentrated than it had been, among a mere 36,300 people, or 0.0005% of the population. The corollary of this has been, and will continue to be, a general decline in the living standards of the working class in most of the advanced capitalist economies: at the same time as the wealth of the richest grew, global unemployment rose by 14.4%.

The role of finance-capital in surplus-extraction varies considerably, of course - and here, China's contribution to the reproduction of the world's ruling class stands out. While financial bail-outs (temporarily) solved many of the problems of the rich in Europe and North America, growth driven by unprecedented spending commitments in China (and, to a lesser extent, India, whose stimulus actually began before the crisis) kept the rich from the Asia-Pacific region in dough, and contributed to the wealth of the US ruling class. This could happen partly because China's growth rates were, like those of many 'newly industrialising countries', already robust. This meant that China's per capita stimulus was greater than that of any other country, and as such accounted for 95% of economic growth in the first three quarters of 2009. But it was also in part because state ownership of the financial and banking sector in China has enabled the government to have more control over the coordination of its stimulus and its effects.

Much has been made of the regime's policy of driving up wages. In fact, what has happened is that China's stimulus enabled an increase in the total amount of surplus value, both by increasing the total employment of labour and by increasing the productivity of labour. Productivity growth has offset wage growth, thus allowing an increase in working class wages and living standards to take place, while continuing the long term strend for wages to decrease as a share of GDP [pdf]. The result is that the top 0.4% of the population controls 70% of the country's wealth. Chinese growth has actually depended on wages sliding as a share of national wealth, and the world capitalist system would be a lot worse off if that hadn't continued to happen. Indeed, according to a World Bank economist, China's stimulus alone contributed 1% to world growth in 2010 - an extraordinary figure. Its GDP by purchasing power parity is already larger than the US by some calculations. China's growth is enabling its ruling class to dramatically increase its demand for luxury goods, accounting for 49% of luxury market growth as the rich spoil themselves with the usual array of jets, mansions, and yachts. But it has also substantially paid for US growth, through direct investment and sovereign debt purchases.

The role of China's working class, the largest in the world by far, in the reproduction of the world's ruling class has, of course, been steadily growing since 1978. The interesting question now is whether this can continue. The World Wealth Report expects future growth to be led by the Asia-Pacific region, "excluding Japan" - despite the latter's substantial stimulus. This obviously means the rich expect China to continue to drive growth and thus profitability. During the last thirty years, China's growth rates have been significantly ahead of its record following the 1949 revolution, and more than double the world average. Its share of world manufacturing rose from 2 to 18%, picking up the slack as manufacturing jobs were lost in Europe and the US. Its expansion fuelled a regional growth surge, eg allowing Japanese capital to increase profits by outsourcing to Chinese labour, and was a significant driver of world growth since 1982.

But the Chinese economy is accumulating tremendous spare capacity as a result of its stimulus package, adding to a global problem and endangering its future ability to produce sustainable growth. It has constantly had to counteract overheating, and may have to substantially reign in growth just when the rest of the world's economies are doing exactly the same, thus undermining its ability to lead a new phase of capitalist growth. The tendencies toward over-accumulation and declining profitability are already evident. Despite the hype about wage increases, real wages are already so low (manufacturing workers in China get less than 5% of the average in the US) that they can't go much lower. Even if they could, the effect may be to contribute to global deflation, thus harming the economies on which China depends for its export markets. China may thus be closer to the end of a long-term wave of growth than the beginning - that growth having been predicated on a now expired global wave of neoliberal expansion based on 'primitive accumulation' and the subsequent record expansion of the country's working class.

Whether and however the ruling class succeeds in overcoming the present barriers to further accumulation, it's hard to see future waves of growth proceeding in this self-same way. Instead, for the foreseeable future, it looks like there will be heightened competition over a diminishing share of surplus value. And Obama has just announced that America's approach in this will be a revamped 'open doors' policy, advised by a new panel headed by the chief executive of General Electric. This will basically involve coercing other economies into accepting US exports at whatever cost to the national or regional economy being thus prised open. It probably presages a new wave of aggression in the global south, especially where popular movements succeed in establishing governments that are interested in independent development based on some concessions for the working class. One would also expect things like this to happen more often, as white supremacy in its various forms is a well-established praxis for weakening the bargaining power of labour and breaking the political threat from the Left. And, especially in a period like this, when growth is thin on the ground and profits have to be wrested through acts of accumulation-by-dispossession, that is how the ruling class makes its money.

Responding to my post on the imperialism of market reason, Henry at Crooked Timber points out a 'disjunction' between my generally hostile attitude to explanatory paradigms based on 'rational choice', game theory and methodological individualism, and my later endorsement of a book by Erik Olin Wright, himself a supporter of 'rational choice marxism', along with Jon Elster, Alan Carlin, Adam Przeworski, and John Roemer (indeed, Roemer far more than Wright is committed to 'rational choice' as the microfoundational basis for marxist theories of class). Henry's main point is to suggest that there is a perfectly serviceable left-wing version of rational choice theory, and that it provides good models of exploitation and unequal exchange. I can well see that rational choice theory is compatible with a wide range of liberalisms, from right to left. What I want to address is whether rational choice models can add anything of value specifically to marxist theories of history, society and social change.

Before going any further, it's worth clearing up a few points. Firstly, when Henry complains about my "standard-issue dismissal of economic notions of rationality as a kind of imperialism", he is making this seem far more controversial than it actually is. The 'economics imperialism' that is spoken of is the tendency for marginalist precepts to become the basis not merely of economic theory, but increasingly of social sciences covering everything from crime, romance, and statecraft to urban geography and drug addiction. And the public choice theory that I wrote about is a fairly typical example, taking market-based precepts about human behaviour that was designed to explain marketplace behaviour and applying them to a non-market terrain where an 'implicit market' is just assumed. To describe this as imperialism is not to 'dismiss' market-based notions of rationality. I am unaware of any circumstances in which one would 'dismiss' imperialism. Rather, it is to acknowledge their apparent power, capacity and flexibility as explanatory principles. If one dismisses market rationality it is on other grounds, about which more in a moment.

Secondly, when he says that "there is an unexplained jump" in my original post "from the description of microfoundations to more specific claims about public choice economics", it is only fair to point out that these microfoundations - individualism, rational self-interest and exchange - do provide the basis for the specific claims of public choice theorists. Whether or not Henry is right that the right-wing bias lies in the models used by public choice economists rather than the microfoundations, which we will come back to, there is no inexplicable 'jump' from foundations to explanations. And my rejection of the microfoundations as essentially circular and reductionist does not depend on the rejection of public choice theory. One the contrary, rejecting the microfoundations of market-based 'rationality' simply provides the basis for a more thoroughoing dissent from public choice theory than someone committed to methodological individualism and game-theoretic models could concur with. Thirdly, I don't think I need to spell this out, but just to mention that it is possible to appreciate Wright's attempt to offer a rigorously marxist interpretation of class without agreeing with his estimation of rational choice - I will say more about this later. Lastly, in passing, I'm also not convinced that the problem of how social democrats "win elections where the working class is not actually in the majority" is actually a real problem. This observation implies that the model of class and exploitation that Henry is working with is incommensurable with the marxist model.

The marxist theory of history
So, these quibbles stated, let me also state what I understand to be the basis of the marxist theory of class, exploitation and modes of production, so that we can see whether rational choice models can add anything valuable to it. The basis of Marx's theory is not the individual of liberal theory but the human society, and the fundamental aspect of any society is how they produce sufficient material goods through the alteration of 'nature' to survive and reproduce themselves in their given state. Marx's contention is that in pre-class ('primitive communist') societies, there was no surplus available to support an elite or 'ruling class', so egalitarian relations prevailed. But at a certain level of the development of the forces of production, a small surplus became available, and thus it became possible for a ruling class to arise. More than that, since the further development of the means of production requires individual sacrifice and privation that no individual would willingly consent to, the emergence of a ruling class is optimal for the further development of productive forces and thus of mankind's ability to transform nature for its own benefit. For a class society to emerge, it was then necessary for a group to have the capacity and opportunity to sieze control of the surplus and of the means of physical and ideological coercion. Thus begins the sequence of class societies that, hopefully, is finally terminated with the supercession of capitalism.

There is more. The level of surplus, and the forces of production will allow only a certain range of relations of production. The forms of exploitation that arise at any given point are thus limited by the available means of production, such that - for example - slave-based systems would be unfeasible in an era of computerised technology, because of the level of culture and education required to work those systems. At a certain point in the development of the forces of production, the further development of these forces is basically incompatible with existing relations of production. Assuming that there is an agency sufficient to carry through a revolutionary transformation of society - a big assumption to make - the forces of production will continue to be developed within new relations of production. The agency necessary to achieve this change will be a class, or perhaps an alliance between fractions of different classes, with the relevant ideological, organisational and material capacities.

The earliest forms of class society, with a small surplus and only rudimentary forms of technology, were either tributary or slave-based. The larger and more centralised they were, the better they tended to mobilise productive forces, satisfy human needs, and develop culture and technology - the ancient and medieval empires are a case in point. But these tended to reach their limits when further overland expansion become impossible, or cost the empire more than it added in surplus. The tributary empires and feudal societies could develop the productive forces to a certain reasonable high degree, with complex global commercial networks, remarkable technologies, new developments in mathematics, a thriving vernacular literature, and the emergence of the rudiments of science. But they tended to hit a ceiling. The empires collapsed and disintegrated, the feudal societies were prey to conquest, diseases wiping out whole populations, mass famines, and political instability.

Marxists legitimately differ on how the transition to capitalism took place, but I would put it like this: the English ruling class, experimenting with various property forms in response to feudal crisis and class struggles, alit upon what became the capitalist form, most basically in the transition from freehold tenancies to leasehold tenancies. In this new form of exploitation, instead of being bonded to the land and to the feudal ruler, the labourers were 'free', and their access to the means of production, and thus to a share of the social product, dependent on their availability for exploitation. Instead of the surplus increasing through more overland expansion, which meant war, or through a brutal ratcheting up of tribute extraction, which could lead to insurrection, surplus was increased as a result of the imperative to continually improve the productivity of labour, and enhance the means of production. This proved optimal for the further 'improvement' of the land, which outstripped feudal methods in productivity considerably. The capitalist aristocrats and bourgeois asserted themselves as England's new ruling class by deposing the monarch and destroying the power of the feudal aristocracy. By virtue of the way in which England's new productive relations could develop the forces of production, its ruling class went from being a clan of nepotistic barbarians ruling over some backwater into an emerging global power, laying down capitalist property relations in Ireland and North America, and eventually leading a global transformation of social property relations. Subsequently, through revolutions, nationalist wars, colonial tyranny, subsequent anti-colonial rebellions, and various putative 'revolutions from above', capitalist relations were established globally.

In theory, as the market-based coercion of capitalism produces a mega surplus, or at least productive forces sufficient to potentially produce a mega surplus, it also removes the necessity of coercion and exploitation for the further development of the means of production. If there is enough of a surplus to feed, clothe, house and educate everyone, then there is no need for the surplus to be concentrated among a few. In fact, at a certain point, this begins to hold back the further development of the means of production, as concentrating ownership and fundamental decision-making in the hands of a few necessarily squanders the potential expertise, talent and ingenuity of the great mass of humanity.

By virtue of the same theory, the agency that is exploited - the working class, who must form the majority in any developed capitalist society - has both an interest in abolishing class relations and a unique capacity to do so because of their centrality to production, their numbers, their ability to organise and the fact that they are socialised in the workplace, the very site of their exploitation. Through the exploitation process, they are united with other groups of workers who are similarly exploited, and form a potentially powerful agency for limiting and resisting that exploitation. Through the same process, they also acquire the expertise and skills necessary to challenge the authority of line managers, and assert their own 'common sense' solutions to production dilemmas. Working class composition, cohesion and power with respect to the employers varies, but there is in this the possibility that the different fractions of the working class could be convoked into a revolutionary agency that is capable of taking control of the means of production and asserting egalitarian productive relations.

To summarise. The character of a society is most basically determined by the available forces of production, and the relations of production (ie between producers and appropriators). This combination of factors is known as the 'mode of production'. The mechanism of exploitation in each case involves the coercive appropriation of a surplus by a ruling class. Change from one mode of production to another takes place when the existing relations of production impede the further development of the forces of production, and a class or class alliance with an interest in social transformation and the capacity to carry it out revolutionises the society. The necessity for class relations only persisted for as long as the surplus was relatively modest. Capitalism, providing the potential for superabundance and convoking a potentially revolutionary agency through its very mechanism of exploitation, offers us a way out of exploitative relations. Such is the marxist theory of history, and the revolutionary socialist faith, as I understand it.

Rational choice explanations for exploitation and class societies
Now we can look at what 'rational choice' marxists think are the essential microfoundations of this theory. According to rational choice marxism, the different modes of class rule and exploitation develop from the microfoundations of individuals pursuing their rational self-interest, that interest determined by the individual's location within the class structure. Class relations emerge out of exchanges between differently endowed individuals in a competitive setting. Where the relevant assets that make such exchanges advantageous or not are distributed unequally, the result is necessarily exploitative.

Roemer's approach has it that someone is an exploiter when a more equal distribution of certain resources would leave them worse off, and exploited when a more equal distribution of the same resources would leave them better off. The resource in question is relative to the mode of exploitation and the hypothetical alternative. In the feudal mode of production, the asset that is most inequitably distributed is the freedom to trade one's product - bonded labourers enjoying this asset least of all. This is exploitative in comparison to the hypothetical alternative of capitalism. In this circumstance, the bonded labourer enters into an unequal exchange with the feudal lord in a rationally self-interested way as her alternatives are vagabondage, or death. Most people, rationally seeking to improve their mastery over nature and the material resources available to them, would enter into that exploitative relationship. Similarly, in the capitalist mode of production, the asset that is unequally distributed is access to the means of production. The hypothetical alternative, against which this is deemed exploitative, is socialism. The worker enters into an exploitative relationship with the employer because the alternative of privation in conditions of unemployment, beggary or self-employment is less preferrable. The capitalist likewise takes advantage of this exploitative relationship because of a preference for greater material rewards.

Thus, rational choice theory would appear to have offered a model of exploitation without recourse to the labour theory of value. Even if no transfer of surplus labour to the employer has taken place, there has still been exploitation. Exploitation is a matter of asset distribution, and relative advantage or disadvantage, not of productive relations. This is obviously quite different from the account outlined above, where the class relationship is a social and not an individual relationship. Rational choice marxism, by starting with the individualist, game theoretic precepts that it does, it does not merely fill in missing micro-foundations. It ends with a different - I would say radically different - theory of history, class and exploitation.

But does it provide a superior theory to the classical marxist account? I would say that it fails on a number of grounds. Firstly, by positing differently endowed individuals as the microfoundations of macro-analysis, 'rational choice' marxism smuggles the wider social relations into the unit of individual transaction. It becomes circular, rather than informative, because the very microfoundation that is supposed to explain larger structural facts such as exploitation, class and the structural capacities that flow from these actually contains these embedded within it. So it turns out that the individual is not a self-sufficient explanatory unit constituting social structure, but rather that her capacities and assets are themselves constituted by larger historical, structural and relational factors.

Secondly, each actor is supposed to participate in the exploitative relation in order to maximise utility, but utility is too recursive a notion to be of much explanatory use here. Utility is maximised wherever an individual satisfies her most preferred preferences (assuming that individuals have a well-ordered hierarchy of preferences, a convenient fiction for the purposes of the theory). Whatever an individual is doing, it is assumed that she is maximising utility. If a person commits a crime that is likely to reduce her material well-being we could argue, pace Becker, that she is satisfying a preference for risk. Or that she is satisfying sadistic, or masochistic urges. Or that, quite simply, she is fulfilling a preference to murder which she ranks above other preferences for material well-being. Whatever - the point is that there is no form of behaviour that could not be described as utility-maximising.

If we are trying to explain social phenomena, however, rather than simply redescribe it in market-based language, we have to do better than this. And here methodological collectivism is unavoidable. To explain why a capitalist acts the way she does, it is not sufficient to refer to individual preferences. The imperatives of capital accumulation exert themselves through the competitive pressures of the capitalist market, an historically produced social structure which has forced individuals to become dependent on the market for their survival and reproduction. For the rational choice model to work, capitalist imperatives must be naturalised - they must be simply assumed to be among the existing preferences of capitalists, which they are able to exercise on account of their particular endowments.

Thirdly, the account of exploitation explains the transaction as a freely chosen exchange by individuals pursuing optimising strategies with the endowments available to them. The class position they end up in will depend on the endowments and whether they choose to work for themselves, hire themselves out, or hire others to work for them. But as we have said, these endowments contain the social relations they are supposed to explain, notably under capitalism the capitalist's control of the means of production, and the worker's separation from the means of production. Free choice is severely restricted here, since for the worker there are few alternatives to surrendering a portion of her labour to the owner of the means of production in exchange for access to the means of survival. Some can become lone traders, criminals, beggars, etc. But the opportunities for each within the system are not widespread, so that the majority must hire themselves out if they are to survive. Of necessity, many people with the relevant endowments, and the appropriate order of preferences, would not be able to exercise those alternative choices mentioned. Further, there are elaborate social mechanisms which construct people's choices, from education, with its various selective and grading mechanisms, and the full range of state and private sector bureaus intended to direct people into this or that line of employment, to culture, which plays a vital role in propagating the values that ensure the reproduction of the system.

Indeed, the combined mechanisms of compulsion - which are central to the classical marxist explanation of exploitation - while not completely obviating individual choice, do so severely limit choice as to make it questionable whether grounding the exploitation mechanism in individuals freely pursuing optimal utility-maximising strategies is a sensible way to proceed. But for rational choice marxism, a free exchange has to be the starting point for explaining exploitation, because its model breaks society down into free and roughly equal individuals. And because it explains exploitation in this individualistic way, it has difficulty explaining class cohesion, social conflict, and particularly the transition from one mode of production to another. For example, in the transition to capitalism there is no question of capitalist social relations simply, mysteriously emerging as an option that individuals could take up by, for example, becoming waged labourers (as in Roemer's imagined model). Capitalist social property relations emerged through class struggle and coercion, and were consolidated in England at least by means of regicide. One mode of production displaced the other not through the aggregate rational choices of individual aristocrats and peasants, gradually converting to capitalism, but through collective interest and action.

The problems with rational choice marxism, not exhausted here, are basically reducible to the problems with rational choice theory itself - the circularity of its explanations, its dogmatic assertion that the individual is the proper foundation of social analysis, and its vulgar, reductionist model of agency. Rational choice marxism's attempt to reinscribe the marxist theory of history and class struggle in the terms of methodological individualism has to be judged a failure. There remains the question of whether the precepts market 'rationality' are commensurable with marxist theory.

Embedded normative assumptions
Henry's most basic assertion is that rational choice models don't contain inbuilt normative assumptions, or theses about the social world that would lead to them having a right-wing bias. It is certainly possible for rational choice theorists to resist right-wing interpretations, but to do so it would be necessary to acknowledge a few things that Henry does not. First of all, to return to one of the previous quibbles, the origin of rational choice theory is precisely in the Cold War state and the right-wing free market theology it produced, which Henry claims are somehow neatly separable from it.

Secondly, the founding assumptions of rational choice theory are directly imported from classical liberalism. The idea that social action ultimately takes place at the level of the individual, that people are utility maximisers, and that such maximisation optimally takes place in the process of exchange is obviously derived from liberal, contractarian political economy. This is inescapably normative, and unavoidably contains propositions about the social world - most obviously that, whatever mode of production prevails, social life is composed from an aggregate of self-sufficient individual units with varying endowments and attributes engaging in repeated acts of exchange in a competitive setting. Thus, social and temporally specific aspects of behaviour under capitalism are, through their insertion into a set of ahistorical claims about human nature, naturalised and universalised. Characteristic of Marx's approach, by contrast, is that he does not assume that the logic of capitalism results from individual propensities.

It is obvious enough that rational choice theory is not necessarily right-wing, since there are plenty of left-wing exponents of it, but nor is it avalent. And insofar as there have been attempts, largely in the retreat from Althusserian structuralism, to reconcile rational choice with marxism, the tendency has been for one to be adulterated rather than complemented and strengthened by the other.

Since my citation of E O Wright triggered Henry's reflections, I will use him as a case in point. Wright is an 'analytic marxist' with an interest in rational choice theory. But the more closely he cleaves to marxism, the less weight he attributes to rational choice precepts. In 'Marxism and methodological individualism', an essay written with Elliott Sober and Andrew Levine, he argues that what is distinctive about methodological individualism - its commitment to explaining social phenomena by attributing primary explanatory power to individuals, such that it recognises no irreducible explanatory power for the properties and relations of aggregate social entities - is incompatible with marxism (and bad social science to boot). He is right. But methodological individualism is a fundamental commitment of rational choice theory since its inception. It is a commitment shared by Henry's favoured game theorist, Tom Slee. And it is a commitment made by most who choose to call themselves rational choice marxists. To that extent, inasmuch as Wright is (perhaps was) a far more orthodox marxist than his rational choice peers, he is a far less enthusiastic rational choice theorist.

For my part, while I think it is correct to attribute some explanatory power to individual relations and actors, I don't think the market-based models of rationality are very useful for assessing individual motives and behaviour. They can possibly sustain left-liberal interpretations, but I maintain that they will still be bad left-liberal interpretations. And I certainly don't think they can provide 'microfoundations' for a marxist theory of society and history.

In 1979, Erik Olin Wright produced a book on the relation between class and income inequality with the aim of persuading social scientists working in the field of inequality to take marxist ideas seriously. He was, to put it mildly, in the wrong place at the wrong time. But his procedure was to rigorously conceptualise class as an antagonistic relationship centred on exploitation, rather than a system of gradations, or a competitive system based on the technical division of labour, market position, or authority relations. Having done this, he proceeded to show that with this understanding of class divisions in mind, it was possible to provide a powerful explanatory framework for understanding how income inequalities are perpetuated. I don't know whether much work is really being done on this subject these days, but here's one recent sociological attempt to situation inequalities in terms of production, which should be the basis of further research:

"These growing inequalities are clearly related to changes in employment relations. The work of entrepreneurs, managers and a top elite of professionals and technical experts has been considered increasingly worthy of high economic rewards, while rank and file workers have been subjected to pay restraints and wage cuts. Gosling et al. (1996) report on the widening gap between skilled and unskilled workers, along with increasing disparities within skill categories. Generally the picture is one of polarization between the well qualified and unqualified; between 1997 and 1993, the median wages of those with higher education rose by one third, while for those who left school by sixteen the figure was 10 per cent.

"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, chief executives and directors received massive pay rises, along with huge bonuses and stakes of shareholdings in their companies; for example, in 1998 Sir Richard Sykes of Glaxo Wellcome had a 53 percent increase to bring his salary to £1.7 million, sir Geoff Mulcahy of Woolworths and B&Q a rise of 39 per cent to reach £1.5 million. In America Rifkin (1995) reports that the 4 per cent of what he terms the ‘knowledge elite’ earn as much as the bottom 51 per cent of wage earners: their gains were made at the expense of the mass of employees, who faced lower pay levels, loss of jobs and declining state benefits: ‘While millions of urban and rural poor languish in poverty, and an increasing number of suburban middle-income wage-earners feel the bite of re-engineering … a small elite of American knowledge workers, entrepreneurs and corporate managers reap the benefits of the new high-tech global economy’ (p. 180). The prosperity of the super-rich is shown in the fact reported by Kirby (1999a) that the ten richest men in the world earn more than the total wealth of the forty-eight poorest countries in the world, whose populations total some 560 million people. The UN estimates that $40 billion would be needed to achieve basic education and health care for everybody in the world, along with adequate food, water supplies and sanitation: $40 billion is less than 4 per cent of the combined wealth of the world’s 225 richest people."

—	Harriet Bradley et al, Myths at Work, Polity, 2000, pp. 138-9

Nina Power applies the scalpel of socialist feminist critique to the Right to Work campaign in today's Guardian. This is most welcome, because the campaign against the cuts, and against unemployment, should be the topic of urgent debate in the press - which otherwise shows little interest in the concerns of the working class. (Ask yourself this: all newspapers have a 'business' section, overwhelmingly concerned with the doings of chief executives, financiers and multinationals, so why is there no labour section?) Power's basic point is that the slogan 'Right to Work' is problematic because of the way in which it suggests that access to waged labour is itself a sufficient solution, and secondly because of certain connotations that it may have in participating in a discourse that elevates work to "the ultimate mark of a man or, in more recent decades, a woman too."

Indeed, while I don't completely agree with Power's analysis, there's a real problem here. We have a Tory government that is determined to cut the welfare state, slashing benefits, driving more and more of the disabled off benefits. (On this latter, see Christopher Read's disturbing article for the New Left Project). One of the ways in which this is justified is by means of a moralistic, coercive appeal to work as the alternative to poverty and 'dependency culture'. Work, in this reactionary trope, confers dignity and respectability. Indeed, it is put to us that if we truly respect our elders, we have to find a way to 'allow' older people to stay on in work for a few more years before claiming their pension entitlement, even as youth unemployment soars, and even if this means millions of people die before seeing a single penny of their deferred wages.

To the extent that asserting a 'right to work' could be seen as colluding in this idea, I can see the virtue of Power's alternative 'refusal to work': the right to be lazy, as Lafargue put it. A central component of socialism in its marxist variant is the drive to reduce the burden of compulsory labour on people, using productivity gains to shorten people's working lives and elongate their living hours. Concretely, in the context of a recession with mass unemployment, we can see how this might translate into a real demand: share the work around more equitably, give us a shorter working week with no loss of pay.

So, here's where Power's argument becomes problematic. A central campaigning demand of 'Right to Work' is a 35 hour week with no loss of pay, as affirmed at the 2010 conference. This is not especially radical. The New Economic Foundation goes farther, demanding a 21 hour working week, spread over four days. But given that the average working week in the UK is the longest in Europe at some 41.4 hours, and given that the average worker in the UK performs two months of unpaid overtime each year, a compulsory 35 hour week would be a good start, and constitute a relief for millions of workers. It would, in the marxist lexicon, reduce the rate of exploitation, as well as giving people more leisure time and reducing the demonstrably adverse effects of over-work - the physiological effects described by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in The Spirit Level, and the psychological effects described by Oliver James in Affluenza.

The Federation of European Employers, of course, sees things differently. They believe that regulations and social benefits, giving people the right to holidays and sick leave for example, is costing EU businesses too much, and they want to see such entitlements removed so that more time is spent at work and thus more surplus extracted. The CBI, for its part, is committed to maintaining high working hours and its successful lobbying to maintain Britain's opt out of the EU Working Time directive is one of the politico-legal bases for Britain's over-long working week and high rates of exploitation and inequality. So, the Right to Work campaign positions it against the employers, the government, and their moralising drive to force people to work more. We are for the right to work - for access to waged labour - but we are also for the right to work less for the same wage. That can't be accomplished unless the work is shared more equitably, and unless unemployment is systematically attacked.

The demand for the right to work is also a demand to end the ruling class policy of maintaining a certain rate of unemployment (typically 5% in growth periods) to weaken the bargaining power of labour, reduce wage claims and thus supposedly control inflation. It's a demand, tacitly, to increase the share of the social product going to labour. This is important because, as Power points out, the mass entry of women into the workforce in the last forty years or so has coincided with wage stagnation and attacks on welfare, such that the amount of work being done by men and women has increased while the share of the social product going to labour has diminished. New Labour's adaptation to neoliberalism meant that Gordon Brown embraced a definition of 'full employment' as the maximum employment that will place no upward pressure on inflation. That has actually involved consistently high rates of unemployment and is thus inconsistent with the right to work. This means that women in particular are suffering: with the dual burden of domestic and workplace labour increasing the total amount of work performed by women, both the social wage and the market wage have stagnated or declined for millions. Defending the right to work is therefore an important weapon in defending the income of workers, especially the most precariously employed, lowest paid women workers.

Now the Tories' attack on welfare will adversely effect women in two ways. It will drive up unemployment by relieving hundreds of thousands of public sector workers - disproportionately female - of their jobs. It will also reduce help for working mothers and children, further depress the social wage, and make it less easy for mothers to seek paid work. That's why they're pushing the 'family' agenda, as if restoring Victorian patriarchal values will sweep up the social mess created by these cuts. This is why a defence of the welfare state is an essential component of Right to Work's strategy, and is also a vital element of women's liberation.

Lastly, do we need a new slogan to escape the pharisaical connotations alluded to above? I don't know that we do. The right to work is not coextensive with the obligation to work. On the contrary, asserting the right to work is essential for the purpose of reducing the amount of work that people have to do, and increasing the share of the social product they receive for their labour. It is also synonymous with defending the welfare state, so that unwaged work is paid in some sense. It does not entail "working even harder for less so that those at the top can keep more" - quite the reverse. Most importantly, I think, the slogan cuts through the hypocrisy of the Tory cuts agenda. As much as they bluster about the redeeming powers of waged work, they are engaged in a programme that systematically attacks the right to work which we defiantly assert. What we need, I daresay, is not a new slogan, but a militant application of the current slogan. There lies the real basis for a movement to liberate ourselves from the burden of compulsory, soul-destroying, exploitative labour.

So Cameron relaunched his "Big Society" propaganda campaign today. The Prime Minister did not so much spell out his proposed changes as semaphore them with a series of nauseating platitudes. We are told, for instance, that he wants "communities with oomph", sounding for all the world as if he's a fucking daytime television motivational guru. He also favours widespread "voluntarism" though sadly not so much in the metaphysical sense as in the sense of people doing for free what public sector workers used to do for a wage. And, of course, he has set his canon against "centralised bureaucracy" in the public services. Eric Pickles MP suggests that the basic aim of the "Big Society" is to "get more for less", a telling turn of phrase that I will allow you to parse for yourselves - but only after you've juxtaposed it with David Cameron's claim that it is "not about trying to save money".

The "Big Society" is an emetic name for an emetic project. It is, above all, a class project, a war with labour over the share of the social product. The contest is being launched on multiple fronts simultaneously. On the one hand, there is the project of accumulation-by-dispossession, an attempt to raid the public sector in a very audacious way and turn its assets into highly profitable enterprises at just the point when most sectors of industry are showing very lacklustre returns, and when companies are reluctant to invest elsewhere. On the other, there is the very naked effort to increase the rate of exploitation, and restore profitability in that fashion, which involves weakening the bargaining power of labour through legislative means but also by weakening the still sizeable public sector unions. Thirdly, there is an attempt to still further reverse the political gains made by the working class, rolling back democracy within the state under the rubric of 'empowerment' and similar new-age managerial bollocks. This is not just a project of the capitalist class with respect to the working class.

It also a programme for the continued hegemony of the financial fraction within the ruling class. Whatever regulations and stabilizing measures emerge to (try to) prevent the financial sector from completely sinking the capitalist system with its next crisis, there is every sign that the ConDems want to maintain the authority of the City as the main driver of growth and consumption. The 'free schools' and 'GP-led' NHS trusts will provide the financiers with an excellent source of raw material for further financial 'innovation', since these costly entities will have to borrow private capital, which borrowing can be repeatedly refinanced, and the debt itself sliced, diced, tranched and repackaged into bundles of debt parcels that can be speculated on - a blue chip investment since the schools and hospitals, though administered for private profit, will be owned by the public and finally maintained at public expense. The construction, manufacturing and service industries will also make a mint out of these, just as their profit margins will continue to be bumped up by their financial investments.

There are grave risks associated with this "Big Society" project, about which more in a later post. Suffice to say, however: the capitalist class is not stupid, and neither are the Tories. They are not merely engaged in an unintelligent or rigidly doctrinal ploy. This is unlikely to restore dynamism to capitalist industry, but there will be rewards from successfully pulling off this project even if it doesn't restore growth, and there is little else coming down the pipeline. The ruling class is not stupid - it is desperate.

One of the projects I'm working on at the moment is the subject of work under capitalism. I have it in mind to write the kind of book that insubordinate types such as yourselves could take to work. It would be a sociological satire, a users' guide to the workplace, a good way of wasting company time, and a resource for the bored, stressed and bullied. It would be a work of explanation and incitement combined. Are you interested yet?

One aspect of the subject that always comes up is the way in which politicians speak of work as dignifying and emancipating. Whether you're a single mother, disabled, or simply unemployed, work is the answer. There's an important sense in which this is true. If you're not in a workplace, there's no one to socialise with, organise with, or fight against. You're stuck with your narrow horizons, enforced by a miserly income. In work, you can get a certain measure of independence and self-respect - sociological studies tend to show that this is what people value about work, and it's what attracts women to jobs even where they are paid less than men, even when the job is emotionally or physically taxing. It's an escape from house-bound drudgery.

But work under capitalism can never be so unambiguously liberating, and I would hesitate to participate in the paeans without at least considering the matter of exploitation, and the way in which oppression can be intensified when intersecting with exploitative processes. In this respect, there was an interesting discussion at yesterday's Marxism meeting featuring Nina Power, Hester Eisenstein and Judith Orr. Those of you who have read Nina's book will know that it is a witty, trenchantly iconoclastic and incisive re-thinking of feminist mainstays on subjects from equality to pornography, its provocative opening line setting the tone for the combative, aphoristic style of exposition that follows. The chapter on the feminization of labour and the arguments therein were the source of mild controversy at yesterday's panel. To be brief about it, the argument is about the limits of female-emancipation-through-work.

The tremendous changes in the lives of women since WWII, with their increasing absorption into the labour force, is in very obvious ways a step forward. The erosion of the traditional capitalist patriarchy in the form of the nuclear family, which allotted to women a largely passive, housebound role in the reproduction of society, is a development that reactionaries have every reason to regret. When Frank Field MP recently said something to the effect that "single mothers don't need benefits, they need husbands", he was mobilising this retrograde, patriarchal version of social solidarity to justify the coming cuts in welfare and public services that working class women especially depend upon. (The Tories are now reportedly upping the ante, looking for up to 40% cuts across departments, though this may be an effort to make 25% cuts look moderate by comparison). Field explained that he was opposed to the emphasis on getting single mothers into work, and that the real issue was to target 'shirking fathers' who refused to find work. He blamed them for the high number of single parents, and said that they should lose their benefits altogether if they refused to take a government offer of work. This would coerce fathers into being productive and responsible, restore the cohesive family unit and serve mothers better than work. Now, this is a break from New Labour's agenda of coercing single mothers into jobs, but it is a break to the right. It is also significant that this anti-feminist, traditionalist, pro-family discourse is being used to bully working class men. It doesn't at all free women from the burden of bearing sole or key responsibility for the raising of children. In fact, it reinforces that role by attempting to restate the traditional status of men as key bread-winners. But what it does is attack the idea that motherhood is a social responsibility, that the feeding, education and raising of the future labour force is something that society has an interest in, and has to share the burden of. It individualises what is a social issue, and in this way discloses the hard, Thatcherite kernel at the heart of the Tories' "Big Society" soft-sell.

Still, despite the potential for emancipation that work can offer, the persistence of oppression reflected in such features as structural wage inequality suggests that it has definite limits. These limits express themselves in a number of ways. First of all, as insecurity, and the way in which this is turned into a virtue ('flexibility', etc). Secondly, as occupational typecasting, in which women are encouraged to take roles that involve emotional labour, 'caring' and 'nurturing' jobs, jobs requiring communication skills, and so on. Thirdly, as the sexualisation of labour, in which women are required to consider their sexuality - not merely their bodies, but their ability to be flirtatious and charming - as part of their job skills, part of being 'professional'. Employers don't expect to have to shout at their female employees to dress nicely; they expect women to come prepared, knowing the drill, internalising such requisites as part of their own career mission. And this applies outside work as much in the workplace, ie in social networking sites, which employers and recruitment agencies regularly check to dig up information on CV submissions. Women have to see themselves as walking advertisements for themselves. And finally, perhaps, as a conflict between production and reproduction, in which women are expected to manage child birth and rearing in ways that don't burden the employers. This is just one more way in which women are expected to augment the exploitation process by pre-emptively exploiting themselves, by assuming extra hours of labour, by accepting deductions from their income to pay for childcare. The 'labourisation of women', as Power puts it, is a process that has intensified exploitation and reinvented gender oppression. That it doesn't have to be that way, and that the organisation of women in trade unions offers the beginnings of a way out of this deadlock, suggests that these limits arise in part because of a particular organisation of work, perhaps because of the individualisation of work in the neoliberal phase of accumulation, but more broadly because it's capitalism, and capitalism is most efficient when it is most exploitative, and when that exploitation is augmented by oppression.

I suggested previously that the phrase 'work-life balance' inadvertently revealed something about work under capitalism, namely the fact that the majority of one's waking hours are not spent alive, but labouring in a sort of undead capacity. If work and life are separate and opposing modes of existence, then the tendency of the former to increasingly dominate the latter outside of formal working hours, structuring our 'fun', commanding and regulating our socialisation, governing how we conduct ourselves in public, etc., means that capitalism is almost literally sucking the life out of us. That this process is advancing most rapidly for women confirms that the feminization of the proletariat is not automatically a liberation for women - not without the struggle and solidarity it makes possible.