Like most socialists, I follow the Sard, who said that he didn't like to throw stones in the dark.  That is to say, he always needed some opposition to stimulate his thinking about situations, philosophical problems, historical controversies, or political methods.  A few recent arguments with people who are wrong, prompted a few thoughts-in-progress about how to analyse the conjuncture.

I.  The primacy of politics.  This doesn't refer specifically to the Leninist thesis of the primacy of politics which has a general application; rather it refers to the dominant level at which the major social antagonisms are going to be fought over and resolved in one class or another's favour in the coming years.  But in what sense?  One perspective I have encountered is that the weakness of the trade unions is such that if there is going to be an upsurge it is going to happen first through a general political radicalisation, and only thereafter produce a revival of working class organisation.  I don't think such sequential schemas really respect the actual pattern of struggles.  Look at the relationship between the anti-war movement over Gaza, the student occupations and uprising over fees, the germinal feminist revival, and the very large but bureaucracy-led trade union protests and struggles.  I think what you find is not a sequence of 'first politics, then economics', but rather the unpredictable outbreaks of struggles on various levels of the social formation consistent with a system going through organic crisis, each having a reciprocal effect on the others.  The sense in which politics is dominant is that it forms the edifice within which economic and ideological struggles take place, securing their unity and coordination, determining their tempo and efficacy.

Of course it's always true that in the last analysis politics is decisive.  But it's not true that in every conjuncture political struggles are dominant.  The dominance of politics today derives from the centrality of 'austerity politics' as a spatio-temporal fix for capitalism's woes, conducted through the state and centred on the neoliberal reorganisation of the public sector and welfare state.  Mervyn King recently argued that in the short run it would necessary to restrain spending cuts, but in the long run there had to be a drastic rebalancing of the economy away from consumption and towards investment - in other words, put as much of the country's wealth as possible in the hands of the rich and hope they will put it into circulation as capital.  This could only be achieved through state action, which has to be mediated through the political parties and their relationship to social classes.  Therefore, politics predominates.

II. The crisis of authority.  I have referred to an organic crisis.  According to Gramsci, a crisis of capitalism becomes an organic crisis when it affects the state and its hegemonic apparatuses.  And that is exactly what has happened.  One of the significant insights of the state theorist Claus Offe was that this tendency for capitalist crises to become political crises is built in to advanced capitalism insofar as it has developed an expanded political administrative apparatus to cope with the dysfunctions of production and protect its legitimacy.  As soon as there is a serious crisis, not just a recession but something that puts into question whether the system can reproduce itself, it is more likely to radiate into the state and from there into every aspect of production, politics, and ideology, etc.,  reached directly or indirectly by the state.  This is just a tendency, not an inevitability - but for reasons mentioned above, the crisis has certainly reached the state.  The question is how far advanced this process is.

The British capitalist state has always been one of the more stable of its type.  Unlike continental rivals, it has not suffered revolution, invasion, occupation or defeat to a militarily superior rival for centuries.  Its colonial losses were, it is true, considerable.  And that loss of global power and prestige has been a source of constant axe-grinding on the right, the prism through which Northern Ireland, the Falklands and even Europe have been perceived.  But the adaptation was managed without disrupting the continuity of the state.  This matters.  It also matters that the British state is still, for all its losses, a leading imperialist state with considerable global advantages, aloof from the eurozone while enjoying the benefits of EU membership.  This confers a degree of independence of action not available to, say, Greece or Spain.  This government can, if it wants to, increase spending to temporarily dampen a crisis.  It can nationalise a company if it is too important to leave it to the market.  It can bring forward infrastructure investments.  It can even selectively increase benefits, or make certain tax concessions.  As of now, the government and the Bank of England prefers to print money to stimulate lending, which has certain distributive consequences, but basically it has a range of options.   The state also has a system of violence that, despite acute breakdowns, has effectively reinforced consent throughout its long duration.

Nonetheless, the concept of a 'crisis of authority' is a good criterion of historical analysis against which to measure the stability of the British state.  What does a crisis of authority look like?  One would ordinarily look for the withdrawal of consent on the part of the masses, the  mobilization of large subaltern classes against the ruling class, and the detachment of social classes from their representative parties.  Some of these tendencies are visible in the UK today.  There is, first of all, no doubt about the de-alignment of social classes from their representative parties.  This is a secular tendency that is becoming acute due to the successful rollback of representative democracy by means of neoliberal policy.  (Chapter One of The Meaning of David Cameron outlines some of this.)  Second, in some complex ways, consent is being eroded.  Certainly, over the long term there has developed a nebulous and politically polyvalent sense of dissatisfaction with authorities, with officialdom, with the main parties, and with parliament itself.  This doesn't by itself amount to antisystemic feeling, nor is it proof of political radicalisation.  And not all institutions suffer from this general decline in respect.  Trust in the police is resilient, despite constant disclosures of corruption, racism, brutality and murders.  On the immediate questions of austerity and related policies, the balance of popular opinion is against the government - but not on all planks of its agenda, and not necessarily on the worst planks of its agenda.  It is true that any presumed 'consensus' is very fragile, but the support for punitive welfare policies has been quite high.  The current state of the Labour party is substantially responsible for this.  Moreover, the way in which the state can mobilise consent against the enemy of the month (just recently, they used the face of Abu Hamza to conceal the crimes against Babar Ahmed and Talha Ahsan, and it worked a treat) does not indicate that its legitimating resources are running dry.  This is related to the question of state violence which I'll return to.

Finally, what is the state of popular mobilisation?  In and of itself, it is impressive - student occupations and 'riots', Tory HQ smashed up, coordinated strikes in the public sector, mass marches encompassing the breadth and depth of the organised working class and its periphery, even a 1980s-style youth uprising against the police.  Yet these are notable for a) being episodic and apt to lose momentum very quickly, and b) being totally unequal to the problem, to the scale of the ruling class mobilisation and its goals.  The credit crunch came just as the British social movements were abating, the left was entering a vicious downswing, and the Tories were pulling themselves back together as a fit team to replace the bruised, tired, shat-on-looking New Labour cabinet.  The popular movements since the winter of 2010-11 have really been playing catch-up, and not actually catching up thus far.

Greece: that is a full-blown crisis of authority.  If the British state does reach that condition, it will be catalysed by outbreaks of social struggles which are not visible today, and not possible to predict.

III. Violence and consent.  It is a mistake to think that a turn toward greater violence on the part of the state is a sign of weakness, that it signifies a crisis of consent and thus an erosion of the civil society basis of the state.  Violence and consent are not separate, opposed quantities; violence is one of the main ways in which consent is secured.  Take an example.  The British police, like no other police force, has embraced the tactic of kettling.  It works in three ways.  First, it is managed violence: it creates moving frontiers where a confrontation with angry crowds can happen within a predictable range of circumstances, with police able to concentrate their forces at certain points when necessary and according to the geographical terrain already incorporated into the kettling plan.  Second, it is biopower: it acts on the fact that people have biological needs and tendencies, that they need to excrete, that they become cold and tired, that they have caloric requirements which, unsatisfied, leave them physically weak and vulnerable.  Third, it is ideology.  The very act of 'kettling' people communicates that they are dangerous criminals, if not bestiary.  It also creates the scenario in which this point can be 'proved'.  Notwithstanding the problems it has had in the courts, this has been one of the most effective means of shutting down protest movements threatening to gain momentum.

  In this tactic, coercion and consent, violence and ideology, are combined.  The 'rule of law' is the dominant form of the dominant ideology, the main area in which consent is organised; and it is precisely through violence that it is materialised. Thus, it isn't that the state turns to violence when consent has been exhausted, but rather that it must reorganise violence in the constitution of social categories (race, culture, nationality, citizenship, criminality, subversion, entitlement, rights, etc), to found consent on a new basis.  It is therefore mistaken to see violence as 'making up for' a lack of consent, as a factor merely held 'in reserve' for when consent erodes.  Recall Gramsci's metaphor: "State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion".  This quite an interesting topography.  Rather than the core of the state consisting of repressive institutions, special bodies of armed men, etc., which is protected by the outward layers of civil society, the repressive institutions form an integument shaping and protecting the flesh of the body politic.  One way to read this is to relate it to the concept of hegemonic practices in which the dominant classes attempt to organise a cross-class coalition in support of the historic goals they have set themselves.  It would be mistaken to see hegemony as a state actually achieved for most of the time; it is best to see it as a tendency guiding the organisation of class domination in a capitalist democracy.  When some form of potentially hegemonic coalition is achieved, there is always an excluded remnant of classes and class fractions that aren’t incorporated.  In a genuinely hegemonic situation, the excluded remnant is an easily policed and suppressed minority; most of the time, it is actually a majority that must somehow be disorganised, stratified and divided.  The role of violence in this situation would be prove the implausibility of resistance to both the dominant bloc, whose unity is thereby secured, and to the excluded, whose acquiescence is thereby gained.

  One aspect of the complex political and ideological mix that was Thatcherism was its attempt to re-found consent on a new populist right basis, incorporating sections of the skilled working class alongside the petty bourgeoisie and big business in a new dominant bloc.  Rather than 'from cradle to grave' provision, the traditional state philosophy of Labourism, 'the discipline of the market' became the new basis of consent.  If the new regime was more violent, this was not to 'make up for' a lack of consent, though the regime was narrower in its social basis and had of necessity to disorganise a much wider coalition, but rather because the new regime had to simultaneously demolish the bases for militant leftist politics in order to viable, and construct a new form of consent based on penalising the poor.

  The purpose here is not to deny that the ruling class is weak and fractious, and the social basis of the dominant bloc narrowing dangerously from its point of view.  That is evident in the pathologies already mentioned, the degeneration of the main capitalist parties, the decline of legitimate institutions, and so on.  Rather, it is to say that an escalation of violence is not in itself indicative of weakness.  So long as the state’s violence is actually efficacious in securing consent, and disorganising the popular classes, and as long as it can be coupled with selective material incentives which are in themselves perfectly compatible with an overall increase in the rate of exploitation and a long-term material loss for most of the population, then it need not be.  And the reason why it has become necessary to Defend the Right to Protest is that this violence is proving extremely efficient in the short run.

IV.  The disorganisation of the popular classes.  Thus far, there has been no general unity on the immediate goals, tactics or politics of an anti-cuts movement, nor has a viable compromise between the rival perspectives been possible.  One result of this is that there is a vacuum in which fragmented groups and platforms are capable, at certain junctures, of projecting influence well beyond their real size and social depth.  We have seen this with UK Uncut and, in a different way, Right to Work; we saw it with various small, radical, student and education groups during the student riots; arguably, a similar type of dynamic was visible in last summer's riots.  (In localised situations, even smaller formations can acquire a significant role: eg, the campaign against the closure of Chase Farm hospital is now most visibly conducted by an infinitessimal sect, due mainly to the seeming collapse of the Save Chase Farm group since Nick de Bois was elected.)  The result of the vacuum is that adventurism and stunts acquire an exaggerated importance - not that I'm remotely snobbish about these things, but they can only advance us so far, and they tend to dissipate as quickly as they take off.  This state of affairs is a register of failure, to be sure, but it's not just a failure of initiative and leadership on the part of the radical Left.  It's a measure of the disorientation and demoralisation of the most advanced, radical workers during the New Labour era, and particularly in the wake of the worst global crisis since the Great Depression.

  In contrast to most continental equivalents, where there has been a left breakaway from the major social democratic formations fusing with Communists and the far left, resulting in some degree of electoral realignment, the political opposition to the Tories is hegemonised by the Labour Party in England and to an extent in Wales.  This is all very fragile.  George Galloway's breakthrough in Bradford was not a miracle; it reflected a wider volatility, a willingness to suddenly, sharply swing behind alternative reformisms where they appear to be viable - the SNP in Scotland, Caroline Lucas in Brighton, Galloway in Bradford, possibly Plaid Cymru in Wales, and it may well have been Kate Hudson or Salma Yaqoob next.  There is nothing inevitable or secure about Labour's electoral and political dominance in the working class, or the absence of an alternative.  The lamentable performance of Johann Lamont in Scotland seems to ensure that Labour will not recover there for some time, if it does. 

  Nonetheless, there is something different about the UK in this respect, which makes realignment a lot harder.  First of all, no left-wing opposition developed and split away from New Labour as it implemented neoliberal policies, because the defeat of the Left after 1985 was so severe and sweeping that the Blairite leadership was able to win acquiescence for the main lines of its policies in advance.  Even if the concrete realisation of those lines (tuition fees, PFI, etc) produced dissatisfaction, there was no underlying precept on which opposition could be founded.  Second, even when an issue (the Iraq war) did arise which could potentially divide the Labour Party, it did not.  Only George Galloway split away, because he was forced to rather than because he wanted to.  This is partly because the Labour machinery had been so tightly sewn up by the Blairites that an internal opposition was almost impossible to mount; most people left the party rather than fight within it.  Faced with this, there was no obvious basis for the small number of left MPs to lead a split-away, even if they were brave enough to do so.  The result is that the radical left formation that did emerge, Respect, made much of its small, locally concentrated forces, but was inherently limited compared to its most of its equivalents.  The SSP... oy.

  The only serious, national resistance to the Tories' programme is coming from the trade unions.  It is not being led by the rank and file.  Rather, the rank and file pressures the union bureaucracy for action, but remains dependent on the bureaucracy to actually take the initiative.  The shop steward movement hardly exists today.  It is not just that it is numerical depleted, both in absolute terms and relative to the unionised workforce.  It is that the role of stewards has changed dramatically, so that they end up as case workers rather than the people calling 'all out' when an issue arises.  So there isn't a basis for a rank and file movement - that would have to be painstakingly constructed in and through struggles.  Nor is there a big battalion of militant workers ready to take on the government by itself.  No one has the confidence after decades of neoliberal assault and diminishing strength and influence, to risk everything in a big set-piece dispute with the government.  This isn’t the 1980s but, alas, everyone still remembers the Miners.  The result is that strikes are seen by the union leadership as a bureaucratic manoeuvre to force the government to soften its bargaining stance. 

  This brings us back to the dominance of politics.  The unions, despite their relative historical weakness, have two potential significant strengths.  One is that their private sector membership is concentrated in clusters of high value-added parts of the economy.  The workers thus covered have considerable strategic power, as they can cut off crucial flows of surplus value very quickly.  The second, more significant, is that most of their members are based in the public sector and exercise real political power as a result.  It is not just that they can shut down vital processes in the extended reproduction of capital, thus indirectly disrupting the flow of surplus value; they can create a crisis for the state and for the government of the day.  Whereas the government can take a certain tactical distance from private sector strikes (‘hope this is resolved expeditiously, both sides need to get round the table’ etc.), it is directly implicated when nurses, teachers, civil servants and rubbish collectors go on strike.  This gives the unions the potential, and only the potential, to ascend beyond the ‘economic corporate’ mode of organising.  They are historically narrowly based, yet their immediate problems – pension and pay cuts, longer hours, etc. – can be swiftly and logically linked to the problems of other sections of the working and even middle classes.  They can create a broad system of alliances by fusing their struggles with those of students, pensioners, communities losing their hospitals and council services, and non-unionised workers suffering low pay and insecure work. 

  Recently, a motion was passed at the TUC supporting a general strike.  In its core, it would be a coordinated public sector strike with some private sector support.  But it could attract the wider support of social movements and those directly affected by cuts.  I note that while most people won’t support a ‘general strike’ call, according to polls anyway, most Labour voters will.  This is very interesting since it suggests that Labour’s voters aren’t necessarily persuaded by the leadership.  It suggests that there’s a section of the working class, I would guess including those who are not unionised, who belong to the most precarious, low-paid or unemployed sections of the working class, which is apprised of the seriousness of the situation and ready for a fightback equal to the threat.  For this to materialise, the ‘general strike’ call would have to be used as a lever to mobilise not just the rank and file of the unions but the most left-wing workers in general, and those involved in the social movements, while pressuring the union leadership into action.  Nothing about that is easy, as there will be strong counter-pressures coming from the Tories, and the press (the recent Hillsborough revelations about the collusion between Conservatives, the police and the media rather make the case for ‘Ideological-State Apparatuses’ in a nutshell).  But there is little else that is concrete, in the way of sustained resistance, to organise around.

V.  Petty Caesarism.  The consensual basis for the British capitalist state has been narrowed over the long-term by the  hollowing out of parliamentary representation inaugurated by neoliberalism, combined with the sharpening of social antagonisms, above all class antagonisms.  While social movements of one kind or another have become a more frequent feature of the landscape, there is a crisis in party-political organisation.  The Tories and Labour have been undergoing a long-term decline, and now the Liberals are likely to be reduced to a small rump (even if the exaggerated interest of media and activists during their spell in government persuades them otherwise).  The dominant political parties are poorly rooted in the population, and lack popular trust. Alongside party membership, voting levels have declined, particularly among the working class.  One effect of this during the crisis has been the manifestation of petty caesarist tendencies.  If, as Gramsci said, all coalitions are a first step in caesarism, the imposition of a Tory-Liberal coalition by civil service initiative is a typically British ruling class version of the type. 

  The decline and fragmentation of the traditional Right is an important, under-examined part of this situation.  The Conservative vote has gone through a long, spasmodic period of degeneration since the late 1960s, punctuated by the collapse in 1974, the partial resurgence under Thatcher, the crisis at the tail end of Thatcherism deferred under Major and returning with a vengeance after 1992.  This reflects not just a decline in traditional right-wing values, but the erosion by attrition of the social basis for even ‘secular’ Conservatism.  Moreover, several crisis points have arisen to threaten the traditional ‘British’ basis of Conservatism – the weakening of the Union, and the integration into Europe.  The Tories are badly placed to handle these crises, and the result alongside a sharp decline in the Tory vote is a fragmentation of the right.  UKIP is ascendant not just as the Thatcherite pressure group that it once resembled, its ‘Save the Pound’ stickers defacing Westminster lamp posts, but as potentially a serious challenger to the Conservatives based on significant sections of the Tory middle class and medium-sized capital.

  One outstanding fact about the British situation is that while racism remains at a historically high level, a result (as I have argued) of extensive state intervention to racialise social conflicts, the government would struggle far more than the last Labour government to use this advantage to re-organise its legitimacy in the crisis context.  In principle, racist paternalism would be one way to organise material incentives in a controlled way that reinforces the neoliberal accumulation regime and the attack on the welfare state.  Yet the Tories under Cameron are too hesitant and vacillating after years of being exiled as ‘the nasty party’, to really actualise such a strategy.   Another striking fact is that the far right, despite their surge over the last decade, never gained a foothold in the UK in the way that fascists in other European societies did.  Undeniably after Barking, Tower Hamlets and Walthamstow, the limit on the growth of the far right is primarily due to the successful model of antifascist action aimed at mobilising broad fronts to prevent and disrupt the local implantation of fascism.  The existence of other right-wing fragments ready to absorb Tory defectors is also plausibly a factor, although the past decade has shown us that it is quite possible for fascist and hard right parties to gain support concurrently.  But the effect of the current incapacity of the Right, coupled with the disorganisation of the popular classes, is precisely to reinforce the tendency toward petty caesarism.  The coalition government is an unstable combination, but it allows the leaderships of both coalition parties a degree of autonomy from their active base.  It renders acute the chronic insulation of parliament from the popular classes. 

  The final factor heightening caesarist tendencies is the division and uncertainty of the bourgeoisie proper.  They are not united by what to do about Europe, or about whether now is the time to start making the cuts, or about how deep they should be.  There is undoubtedly a significant section of bourgeois opinion that is gravitating toward Labour’s preferred solution of bringing forward spending now, and implementing the cuts later, in a way that is less egregiously offensive to working class interests.  In this situation, the apparatuses of the state itself – the higher civil service, the Bank of England, etc. – acquire an elevated role, and the parties of government enter a kind of coalition with them.

  Caesarism emerges because the contending classes have reached a stalemate.  What I referred to as ‘petty caesarism’, then, is just the expression of this tendency in a muted form: not exactly a total stalemate but certainly a state of disarray; polarisation but each side hesitating to enter the fray wholeheartedly; both sides almost running on empty.  One morbid symptom of this tendency is the emergence of rival hybrid forms of politics – ‘Red Toryism’, ‘Blue Labourism’ – in an attempt to short-circuit political polarisation and reconstitute the relationship between party and class.  When people say ‘no one voted for this, how do they think they can get away with it’, the answer is clear: caesarism in this case is a symptom of mutual weakness.  Yes, the ruling class is in crisis, yes it is divided and hesitant, yes it lacks political legitimacy; but as of now, its opponents are not in a better state.

A milestone in labour struggles and women's liberation, a 1968 strike by machinists at Ford Dagenham, is to be turned into a film. The strike fed into the National Joint Action Campaign for Women’s Equal Rights, and resulted in a series of similar struggles across British industry, driving up womens' representation in trade unions. It also forced the Labour government to launch an investigation into Ford's practises by employment secretary Jack Scamp, ultimately resulting in the Equal Pay Act of 1970, one of the signal successes of British feminism. For all that the legislation failed to eradicate the yawning pay gap between male and female workers, it did provide the legal basis for a series of struggles that improved the situation of women. This should be a welcome addition to the spate of British films about working class struggle 'back then', from Brassed Off to the Full Monty - great as these films are, there's usually an antiquarian feel about them, as if class struggle is a sort of museum piece rather than an enduring reality. As Sheila Rowbotham and Huw Beynon write in Looking at Class, while films focused on working class issues in the Sixties were filled with anger and hope, emphasising the prospect of coming changes, even the more light-hearted films about the working class since the 1990s, as well as the grittier fare such as Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher, are incredibly pessimistic, depicting a world of disintegration and individual survival against the odds through tenacity and humour.

I wonder, though, what manner of depiction it will be when the producer renders the subjects thus: "I was fascinated by their story, and what struck me in particular was how innocent and unpoliticised they were. All they wanted was a fair deal. It was common sense rather than any kind of axe to grind." This may be a tactical statement, intended to soften the film's edges, but it's also a commonplace form of revisionism of the kind that mainstream culture often performs on formerly untouchable subjects to render them safe - think of the folk myths about Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela. Think of how posterity condescends to them, erasing as much of their relevance for today's struggles as possible. Or worse, how they're held up as self-sufficient agents of change through moral persuasion, as if they did not operate in a milieu of communism, revolutionary movements, labour militancy, global anti-imperialist struggles, and so on, as if they were not themselves convoked by grass roots agencies that have all but been forgotten.

The women were not 'innocent', as this interview with strike committee leader Rose Boland confirms. They were class militants, and they were part of a labour movement that, through the involvement of socialist women, had started to take the issue of women's oppression seriously. The equal pay that the women were demanding had long been part of the TUC's agenda, and its 1963 congress had pushed for the next Labour government, which was elected the following year, to make equal pay a requirement in law. This was followed by an Industrial Charter for Women drawn up by the TUC's Women's Advisory Committee. This is not to say that the extant left and the labour movement was already totally PC and feminist, and that the women were pushing at an open door - far from it. The strike was also part of a rising wave of women's struggles, which had started to make an impact on the male-dominated labour movement, and was registering in some sections of the revolutionary left. It is appropriate to acknowledge that of the Trotskyist organisations the IS (forerunner of the SWP) did not respond to the women's movement as quickly as it might have done. Calls for involvement in the liberation movement were fiercely resisted at first, according to Martin Shaw, who was a prominent member at the time. (Ian Birchall's response to Shaw, disputing many of his claims, can be read here). It was IS women, coordinating among themselves, who effected a volte face that grew in pace as Seventies militancy escalated. In fact, it is fair to say that in the far left as a whole, women's liberation opened up a whole series of cultural battles on the family, homosexuality, children's rights, and so on. Struggles like the Dagenham machinists' strike, and the movement of which it was a part, had a profoundly civilising influence on the British left, and eventally on much of British society as a whole.

The background of the struggle in Ford is that the company's accumulation strategy produced some of the sharpest industrial conflicts in British labour history, and galvanised a militant shop stewards movement that was at the centre of the most radicalised sectors of the organised labour movement. In its three big plants at Halewood, Dagenham and Swansea, the company acknowledged the trade unions, and it would negotiate over pay, but it was adamant that it would not negotiate over tasks and workload - the assertion of management's right to manage was a centrepiece of Ford's strategy. The trade union leadership, for its part, was happy to go along with the Ford management, agreeing that shop stewards should not interfere in matters liable to have an impact on any productivity deal. So, the struggles that took place were often over precisely the issue of the authority of line managers and bosses. The revolutionary left paid especial heed to such struggles because they were more than "DIY reformism", more than bread-and-butter fights. They seemed to point toward the emergence of an agency that challenged the owners' right to dispose of the means of production as they saw fit. The Ford bosses in Detroit were worried sick about what they saw as the "British disease" of constant industrial conflict such that, in 1972, the company announced plans to build a plant in Franco's Spain, where strikes were largely banned and labour costs systematically repressed.

At the same time, the company pursued a systematically discriminatory policy in pay. Gender management - like race management in Detroit - was an effective way of stratifying and dividing the workforce and extracting more surplus from them. This was accomplished through a grading system that ensured that while one in four male workers were on the slightly higher 'C' grade (for 'skilled' workers), only in four hundred women were. The vast majority of women workers, despite performing the same basic tasks as their male counterparts, were deemed by Ford to be 'unskilled'. Such gradings, as Jack Scamp's court of inquiry pointed out, were 'systematic' without being 'scientific'. They relied to a considerable extent on the subjective judgment of assessors who toured the plants interviewing workers and making on the spot assessments as to what grade women should be on. The women largely worked as sewing machinists, making the car seat covers. Largely because it was seen as a woman's job, it was automatically treated as unskilled. Most of the women were therefore on the lower 'B' grade of pay, but even here they were actually getting paid only 85% of the full 'B' grade wage.

This issue of pay 'grading' was not separate from the issue of managers' right to manage, but integral to it, since managers insisted on controlling and determining job profiles in every detail: the workload, the range of tasks, and the pay grade associated with it. While an overall pay settlement, based on a productivity agreement, was usually negotiated between trade union leaders and managers, this always included a clause that it was for managers to shift workers' around between posts and jobs as they saw fit, to allocate tasks, and introduce labour-saving devices where it would boost profitability. That invariably produced a clash between the common sense of workers, who knew their jobs inside out and who understood the rationale of their tasks better than management, and the impositions of the bosses whose systematic-but-not-scientific evaluations were increasingly segmenting tasks in a way that was discriminatory. In fact, alongside the standard use of gender management, the bosses were finding ways to re-grade old jobs, and to create new ones with less prestige and lower pay. Management sought to impose agreements that would divide workers in different plants and roles, so that Halewood workers would gain where Dagenham workers losts, while small part sprayers would lose where sprayers in other parts of the plant would gain. Some workers were experiencing lay-off and deliberate de-skilling while other workers appeared, if only temporarily, to have it easier. These divisions were encouraged to the maximum by bosses, the better to undermine collective militancy, increase productivity and drive down wage costs - to increase the rate of exploitation, in other words.

In the late 1960s, a series of strikes broke out led by women, first at Halewood and then in Dagenham. These were driven by the same issues that had provoked militancy in male-dominated sectors of the plants - workload, managerial infringement, and job grading, and discriminatory practises. But axis of womens' oppression intersecting with the class conflict added fire to the struggle, and gave a pulse of new energy to the rest of the workforce. Huw Beynon, whose Working for Ford is a classic of industrial sociology, reports that these strikes had a "cathartic" effect on the men in the factories. Though they spoke in a macho and often sexist idiom, and though they were socialised in a patriarchal society that wanted them to hate women, and patronise them, they were gaining respect for their female counterparts. At least the women were having a go, they said. "These women are the only men in the plant," they said. "These tarts have taught us a lesson," they said. "We ought to go down there and shout a big fucking 'thank you'." Subsequent militancy, including sophisticated campaigns for parity in pay among all workers in the industry, owed a huge debt to the women's struggles.

The women at Dagenham didn't win the 'C' grade that they were entitled to, however. The Labour government was determined to contain the rising arc of industrial militancy. Maintaining profitability and growth was central to their ability to deliver reforms, and they were determined to resituate the role of trade unions in British society so that workers could not so easily push up labour costs. The In Place of Strife bill introduced by Barbara Castle as secretary of state for employment and productivity, with the support of the Conservative opposition, had been promulgated to thwart sudden shop steward militancy by forcing secret ballots, a 'cooling off' period, and collective bargaining with legally binding results. The bill failed because of opposition from the trade unions, the Labour NEC, a significant chunk of the Parliamentary Labour Party, and even Labour right-wingers like Jim Callaghan, who opposed state regulation of the unions on ideological grounds. This was an opening shot in the collapse of the post-war consensus, and ultimately the Thatcherites would succeed where the Wilson government failed.

In the meantime, the Dagenham machinists' three week dispute was a signal example of the kind of militancy that the government was determined to contain. Ford needed the workers they discriminated against - you can't sell cars without seat covers - but it was markedly bad at containing militancy. So, Castle intervened. The strike committee were invited to have tea in Whitehall, and they put their demands. The meeting ended with the women accepting 100% of the 'B' grade to be phased in over two years, with a promise of a court of inquiry and an Equal Pay bill that would criminalise separate pay grades for women. This ended an explicit gender bar in pay, but also left in place the most invidious form of discrimination in which womens' work was graded as 'unskilled'.

Note that no work, and no worker, is actually 'unskilled'. Skill in the sense used in industrial relations is a social category - it reflects more on the position of the worker within the labour system than it does on the workers' abilities or even necessarily her tasks. The process of 'de-skilling' labour that I mentioned earlier is a really a process of demotion within the labour system, intended to increase the extraction of surplus. The Scamp-led court of inquiry's verdict that pay grading was highly subjective is crucial here. The determination that womens' work was unskilled was driven by the company's need to contain pay claims, and buttressed by prejudicial assumptions about female labour. So it remains today. Job profiles are still highly gendered, and pay and prestige still attaches more to 'male' labour than it does to 'female' labour. Increasingly, as the service economy has grown, women have been pushed into roles where most of the work emphasises emotional labour, which is often a priori classified as 'unskilled' (though this is notably less true of the more macho 'sales' end of emotional labour). And so the same struggles go on, from a higher plateau.

The re-emergence of feminist agitation in the UK, the packed conventions of the London Feminist Network, the Reclaim the Night marches, a reviving feminist literature that is seeing liberals like Natasha Walter become radicalised, the campaigns against sexual objectification and violence against women with the Million Women Rise marches in the capital, thus forms a vanguard, an avant-garde, of the coming class confrontation. It will be disproportionately female workers in the public sector who will be out on the picket lines in the coming months and years. On the fortieth anniversary of the Equal Pay act, it is fitting that the beginnings of resistance to the long misogynist backlash should also be a frontline in the nascent resurgence of working class struggle.

In a previous post, I gave a terse, tart account of some of the Eurocommunist arguments against left-wing challenges to Labour. You might ask why anyone would take electoral advice from Eurocommunists, since their movement saw two of Europe's largest communist parties in the post-war period, the Italian and French parties, suffer precipitous declines. But these arguments were made when the Socialist Alliance was launched, and repeated when Respect was set up. They continue to have some traction in parts of the Left. I was drawing mainly on the arguments of Eric Hobsbawm against the Communist Party left in the 1980s. Hobsbawm was more nuanced than most of his co-ideologues in that he rejected accounts of the 'new middle class' which claimed that the working class was in a minority. These arguments, as E M Wood has suggested, involved "nothing less than a redefinition of class itself", and thus a revision of the whole marxist conceptual apparatus.

Nonetheless, though Hobsbawm was careful not to entertain this wholesale revision, he did share with the Eurocommunists the contention that the working class alone was not a sufficient social basis for socialism to advance, and that an alliance with progressive sectors of the middle class was necessary. This was because that sector of the working class which was ready to support socialism was too small. The working class, even if it formed a majority, was too conservative in the main to swing behind a more radical alternative, so any attempt to create one amounted to dangerous adventurism. All sorts of left-wing theories have been devised to account for the supposed conservatism of the British working class, but it has been assumed to be real enough. Thus, for example, Perry Anderson maintains that the conservatism of British workers has to do with the mediocrity of its bourgeois revolution, which failed to destroy many of the lineaments of feudalism, the emergence of a proletariat before mature socialist theory emerged to guide its practise, which left it vulnerable to combined aristocratic and bourgeois reaction, and the impact of imperialism on the organised left. Without wishing to demur entirely from the latter point, I wish to establish that two sorts of arguments used to bolster reformism - 'middle class majority' and 'conservative working class' - are in error. The former, I maintain, rests on a conflation of class with status, while the latter makes illegitimate inferences from the outcomes of class struggles to establish the supposed conservatism of workers.

First of all, attempts to establish the contours of class in Britain today are obscured by an over-reliance on income data, life-style indicators, and status indicators. Measurements of class tend to treat classes as objects that can be arithmetically counted if enough appropriate indicators are taken into consideration. For example, the government's annual Labour Force Survey (LFS) breaks down occupation by 'employment status'. This is one of the measurements occasionally cited in the press to discuss class. But employment status does not correspond to class. For example, nurses enjoy 'associate professional' status in the government's classification scheme. This is a compliment to nurses and the prestige in which they are held. However, it is not a class designation. Most nurses exercise no power over other workers, and are themselves subordinate to their employers without sharing in any of their supervisory or coordinating functons, and without exercising mental labour in a way that gives them any control over other workers. They are therefore workers, with only a minority being properly middle class.

Increasingly, this can be said of the teaching profession, also listed under 'associate professional' status. Teachers have in the past had a certain amount of autonomy, a space for creative mental labour, and a real level of social power in socializing children for their coming engagement with the labour market. All of these advantages have been under attack as governments try to routinize what happens in the class room, de-skill and de-professionalise teaching, and subject it to increasing surveillance the better to discipline it. Scheduling is no longer controlled by individual teachers, and the curriculum is centrally dictated. Meanwhile, important school functions are being delegated to casualised teaching assistants. Of course, this varies - teachers in upper crust institutions are less subject to proletarianization, as they are entrusted with the delicate task of socializing the children of the rich. But the majority of teaching staff can't realistically be called middle class these days. And while a number of old professions are being proletarianized, new occupations classed as 'white collar' were de-skilled and subject to more or less intrusive surveillance and supervision from the start. Thus, the temptation to read class categories into 'employment status' categories must be resisted. However, the detailed data on occupations will, with some hefty caveats, be used later to get a rough idea of the relative proportions of the working and middle classes.

NRS social grades are even more frequently used as an index of class in the newspapers, but these are actually even less to do with class than 'employment status'. Category C1, which is taken as a measurement of the 'lower middle class', places clerical workers with no power over other workers alongside junior managers and supervisors, who act as the surveillance and disciplinary limbs of capital. Using this measurement, a middle class majority is usually obtained. Moreover, the data-gathering for such categories is often biased toward the higher end of the 'social class' and income scale, because they gather data only for the 'chief income earner' in each household. If this method is used, then a household which contains more than one adult will only be questioned about its highest income earner. For example, see this breakdown by Ipsos-Mori. By its estimate, the total number of people people aged over 15 years belonging to social grade 'E' (on the lowest salaries and least skilled jobs, on unemployment benefit, on disability benefit, on the state pension, etc.), would be approximately 4m (8% of approx. 50m = 4m). In the year that this breakdown was taken, close to 5m people relied on job-seekers and disability benefit alone. The government had a further 3.25m working in 'elementary' (unskilled) occupations. And a further 1.3m people lived on the state pension alone. In short, in Ipsos-Mori's breakdown, less than half of these who would be classified as social grade 'E' (approx. 9m) were actually detected.

If we treat class as a relationship, not a thing, we won't proceed on the basis of lifestyle or prestige indicators. The starting point for understanding class has to be production, and the relations we enter into when we become part of the labour process. Certainly, the first place you encounter class directly is usually in the workplace. To say 'direct' is not to say 'up close and personal'. One rarely meets a personal entity called 'the boss' these days. Authority is delegated through supervisors, human resources departments, ergonomics experts, IT managers, etc. It is, notwithstanding the occasional run-in with a particularly inept or annoying supervisor, highly impersonal. Most of the people who have some control over your labour, whether in devising your tasks, arranging your working day, or organising the space you work in and the equipment used in it, will never meet you. But nonetheless, the experience of capitalist power is unmistakeable. The people who exert direct power over you, though not themselves owners of capital, share in and exert power on behalf of capital, and their role - as they know very well - is to extract the most from you in order to boost the firm's profits. They identify with capitalist interests.

This layer of supervisors, junior and middle managers, and other overseers of the work process, has grown quite dramatically through the 20th century, and is a direct consequence of efforts by capital to discipline labour and contain militancy. Some have tried to account for their role by revising marxist notions of exploitation, so that - as per E O Wright - supervisors and managers, while not possessing alienable assets, in some sense exploit workers by means of their control over skills and the organisational assets of the firm. This means that exploitation is no longer rooted in the control of productive resources. I see no need to take this step. Supervisors do not directly exploit workers, but they do coerce workers and they have an interest in enhancing the exploitative process for their bosses. For this, they may receive a small share of the surplus, but in that case the exploitation they are engaging in is simply a subsidiary form of classical economic exploitation. This group, which Wright says occupy 'contradictory' class positions, form the greater part of the 'new' middle class, as distinct from the 'old' middle class of independent traders, farmers, smallholding producers etc, which has shrunk considerably over the years and would appear to constitute less than 10% of the working labour force based on LFS data.

What distinguishes the 'new middle class' from the working class is their power over other workers, their ability to exercise mental labour that gives them either direct control of the labour of others or important social power, and their role in enhancing surplus extraction. As a result of the foregoing, they have interests opposed to those of workers and thus can be said to belong to a different class, even though they are employed by capital. My very rough and ready estimate based on the LFS's employment data, bearing in mind we can't subject these to independent scrutiny, suggests that the 'new middle class' constitutes about 30% of the working labour force. Note that I say 'working labour force'. This doesn't include the unemployed, or state pensioners, or those who rely on disability benefits. Of those actually working, a clear majority, certainly more than half and probably close to two thirds, must be counted among the working class. Of the total adult population, including the reserve army of labour, the figure would obviously be higher.

***

What of the reputed conservatism of the British working class which, even at its most militant peaks in the 20th Century, did not break with Labourism? Does this betoken an abiding faith in Britain's parliamentary democracy? Does it suggest a class more at ease with gradual reform and class bargaining than with direct conflict with capitalism? Certainly today's working class does not look like a revolutionary subject, even as Labourism seems at its lowest ebb, parliament is in poor regard, and the gains of social democracy are being rapidly eroded. But the facts of Labour's long hegemony, the failure to establish a viable socialist alternative, and the relative timidity of the working class today, are outcomes that themselves require explanation. Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Cannon's classic study, The American Perception of Class, makes this point with respect to the apparent lack of class consciousness of American workers. The authors point out, based on an examination of past studies, oral labour histories by Terkel et al, and their own data, that American workers are highly conscious that classes exist and are acutely aware of the content of class distinctions. They show that while polls can be devised so that the majority identify themselves as 'middle class', not all polls will show this, and even where they do, people are still far more likely to self-identify as middle class if their position in the labour process does in fact give them authority, autonomy and an interest in enhancing profit accumulation. They also point out that a great deal of the funding and effort that went into creating the doctrinal basis for the 'middle class majority' so beloved of capitalist ideology, viz. a continuous ladder of occupational status and prestige suggestive of constant social mobility, came directly from the American state. Moreover, they indicate that a simple and logically sufficient reason for the failure of socialism to take hold in the American working class is the cohesion and power of the American ruling class. It has the ability to physically overwhelm radical challenges to the existing property order, as demonstrated in its history of violent suppression of the labour movement. It has the ability, which follows from being a ruling class, to organisationally overwhelm political challenges that lack money, ideological clout (newspapers, think-tanks, etc), and political and legal expertise, as most radical and revolutionary challengers do. Quite rationally, therefore, workers responded by putting their weight behind the less radical and more collaborationist unions, and supporting liberal rather than radical political candidates.

The specificities of UK history are obviously different. Britain's working class made its advances much later than US workers did - on the franchise, on union rights, and on the 8-hour working day. On the other hand, Britain's history of labour struggles is not as violent as that of the US. Its ruling class did not stand confident and united after the Second World War as the US ruling class did. Its levels of Cold War repression didn't ever reach the pitch of McCarthyism. Nevertheless, the appeal of Labourism, firsts as a means to socialism and then as a means of attaining social democratic reforms, is fundamentally based on the position of workers with respect to the ruling class. As Vanneman and Cannon have suggested, its is peculiar that the attributes of the ruling class, especially its relative cohesion and power, are rarely factored into explanations of outcomes in class battles. The efforts of British capital to break radical opposition and accomodate limited reforms produced a calculus in which parliamentary pressure and moderate trade unionism stood a better chance of yielding results than outright confrontation. Internationally, the readiness of squabbling ruling classes to unite in opposition to the Russian revolution and crush its exports, contributing to the ultimate corruption and strangling of the revolution at the hands of a new ruling bureaucracy further operated to shut off revolutionary alternatives. This more readily explains the successes of Labourism than does any peculiarity in the development of the British working class and its social psychological expressions.

Alasdair Macintyre, writing in the Sixties, described the basis for reformist socialism, and its eclipse. The conditions necessary for its rise included: a relatively homogenous working class with widespread unemployment and poverty, in which socialist propaganda offered a credible explanation of, and response to, the problems of workers; a credible belief in the independence of the state from class struggle and; a ruling class sufficiently worried about challenges to its control of financial and economic power that it was willing to include the working class in parliamentary processes, the better to limit and contain its demands. In short, reformist socialism was appropriate to a particular phase of class struggle in which enough of the working class was confident enough to pursue socialist transformation, and the ruling class scared enough to offer some reforms. And the evidence is that the ruling class was right to be scared. Paul Mason's Live Working or Die Fighting describes the richness and depth of communist, syndicalist and revolutionary anarchist politics in the British working class movement prior to WWII. Because these were not usually expressed as serious electoral alternatives does not mean they were not a threat to the ruling class. True to form, the ruling class most readily offered reforms following periods of radicalisation and labour organisation, such as had taken place during WWII, during which the ruling class found it necessary to accomodate the left and permit the spread of union organisation, and after which the ruling class was severely weakened.

By the Sixties, the ruling class had recuperated much of its lost power. The working class was far more stratified, and the ruling class had ceased to see it as a potential revolutionary challenger. It had elaborated a set of institutions such as arbitration bodies to manage its transactions with workers outside of parliament. Labour had ceased to express a meaningful socialist commitment and its leadership had attempted, if unsuccessfully, to remove clause 4 from its constitution. Nationalisation, rather than being a baby-step toward sovietisation, had proved to be amenable to capitalist interests. Nationalised firms still operated on the basis of profitability, maintained the same labour discipline and often the same personnel in charge. Even so, Labourism continued to contain (in both senses) a militant socialist component that appeared to offer better chances to the working class than any of the revolutionary parties that emerged and grew during the militancy of the early 1970s. Trade union struggles and left-wing campaigns gained results. Labour proved able to move radically to the Left, and still win elections, even if the state and the ruling class was more than capable of frustrating its most radical promises. The revolutionary left could attract some of the most radicalised workers, but for the majority of workers reform and accomodation rather than outright class conflict was the better bet. And again, it was the proven strength of the ruling class in its ability to deal with workers' insurrections, that led to the Labour Left's ultimate eclipse, as well as the decreased space for revolutionaries. The milestone, or millstone, of the 1984-5 miners' strike and contemporaneous struggles and their outcome undoubtedly made the working class more submissive and timid than it would otherwise have been. The subsequent out-manoeuvering of the left both inside and outside the Labour Party left workers with little choice but to vie for reforms from a right-wing leadership more inspired by Victorian liberalism than by social democracy.

Reformism is not therefore the result of a failure of class consciousness, or an inbuilt conservatism, which would mistakenly infer social psychological attitudes from class outcomes. Nor does it result from the conservative influence of a middle class majority or even a 'labour aristocracy', neither of which entities appear to exist. The overriding factor is class struggle, and the relative strength of the working and ruling classes in a given interval. And the enduring strength of Labourism in its neoliberal phase reflects just such an unfavourable balance of power as to make radical challenges extremely difficult to sustain over a long period. This does not, I might add, entail that such challenges are useless - actually, for reasons I mentioned previously, they seem to be more urgently necessary precisely because New Labour has reached a crisis point in its relationship with the working class. But it does warn against adventurism, and it does direct our attention to the structural limitations within which we operate.