Re-affirming the politics of class

Many Australians like to think of Australia as a “classless society”. We like to believe we can all get along, regardless of our differences. But despite such sentiments, it is the vulnerable who have been the most hard-hit victims of Conservative attacks on welfare, labour rights and the social wage.

What is missing here is any sense of class consciousness. The blue collar working class has declined, to be replaced by a white collar working class in the burgeoning services economy who lack the same sense of class identity, or the traditions of solidarity enjoyed by the old working class. Moreover, many workers today do not like to think of themselves as being working class despite experiencing the same exploitation and insecurity faced by others.

Despite this, however, the vast majority of Australian citizens have nothing to sustain them but their labour and, in the sense intended by Marx, are members of the working class.

The consequence of this is that while the working class does exist as a class in itself, the working class as a class for itself is increasingly marginal.

Regardless, those workers on average and higher incomes often forsake solidarity with the marginalised, including pensioners, single parents, the elderly, the disabled, and many Indigenous Australians.

The challenge for those seeking social justice is not only to mobilise the working class towards such ends as wage justice, safe workplaces, a shorter working week, and economic democracy, at home and internationally, but also to encourage within the working class a solidarity that includes those who may be said to belong to an “underclass”.

Such solidarity does not emerge inevitably as the consequence of the struggle between capital and labour. Rather than relying on this dynamic as some inevitable and deterministic force, as many Marxists were once wont to do, we need to embrace voluntarist politics. Such a politics would base itself in peoples’ deep-seeded desire for social solidarity and cohesion, and in feelings of compassion and mercy that cause them to identify with the plight of the poor and marginal.

Such politics, however, need to shift beyond the mentality of charity, and instead embrace an ethos of struggle and liberation: that politicises inequality and injustice rather than simply expecting charitable organisations to “pick up the pieces” after capitalism.

Against this, we have the real class war with which we are bombarded constantly by the media: negative images of the unemployed, the disabled, Indigenous peoples, single parents, and other scapegoats upon whom to direct blame for the underlying fiscal crisis of the state. The budget may be in surplus, but the failure of the state to provide sufficiently for public infrastructure, welfare and services is still a threat to its legitimacy. This is combined with the negative portrayal of militant unionists, and all who resist the un-ending assault upon labour, as “thugs” who are dehumanised in our eyes.

What the Conservatives call the “bad old days of class warfare” are still here: but this is not the fault of workers or those on the economic and social margins. It is time to shift from the defensive onto an offensive footing.

Rather than seeing tax cuts for the wealthy as “rewarding effort” and “providing incentive” we instead need to return to principles of distributive justice.

The labour market does not automatically provide socially-just outcomes through the laws of supply and demand, although strong unions can, through solidarity, win better wages and conditions than might otherwise be the case.