00:00 Phil Hearse: … of course, but the coal, the fusion [?], all that kind of stuff — anyway, that's another question. But what is the typical — what are the typical [forms of employment]? If the big bastions of the manual working class are closing down, or have been closed down — the big engineering plants, the mines, car factories and so on — what replaces them? What are the typical forms of employment?
00:30 And the point that I wanted to make here — it's not a very original point, I'm not claiming originality for anything that I say here; this point's been made by people repeatedly — is that the typical forms of employment are things like warehouses, like call centres, like distribution centres, at one end; and light industry, because it's not true that Britain has been completely de-industrialised; and retailing. But also, at the other end, financial services, and a host of smaller kinds of professional employment.
01:00 But even if you look at financial services: the number of people who are top bankers in financial services earning millions and all that sort of thing — even in the City, where they're talking about, I don't know, maybe 30,000 or 40,000 people having been made unemployed in the City already. Some of those will be traders and bankers and so on, but the vast majority would be fairly ordinary, low-grade people, including secretaries, clerical workers and so on. Even in banking, the vast majority of employees have pretty humdrum jobs, are not making fast deals, and are not making a very big amount of money.
02:03 But on this thing about affluence — because this writer [?] says, well, look at what people have now compared with the fifties: the electronic goods, holidays abroad and all this kind of thing. Well, what is regarded as a viable standard of living is historically determined by the growth of the productive forces. But on the question of the relative wealth and share of income of the working class: you can't have what is the historically determined average level of income for the working class now without having two incomes.
02:34 In the 1950s you didn't have the vast array of iPods and all those kinds of things, okay, and the internet, widescreen televisions, and holidays — that was just starting. But you could have a single man, or people who were called in the 1950s [?], who had an averagely good manual working-class job, who could buy a house on his own and have hobbies and a shed and pigeons, things like that. Today that's impossible. It's almost impossible for a single person to buy a house today, or to do all those other things.
03:05 And so people struggle to maintain [a standard] like that, but it almost invariably involves both parents working. It almost invariably involves longer hours, more flexible working than existed in the fifties and sixties, Sunday working and all that kind of thing. It involves everything that comrades know about greater insecurity, and all that kind of thing [?] — settlements and basic conditions for their kids and all that kind of thing.
04:07 It's interesting, though, that all the surveys that have been done — not very many, but all of them — show that the number of people who regard themselves as working class is huge. They may be able to afford eighty quid each to go to a Phil Collins concert — Phil Collins, George Michael; I know he doesn't do it either, I don't know any of the new ones, but people from the 1980s — but they still regard themselves as working class.
04:39 And so this survey that was reported by the BBC, by this think tank, showed 67 per cent of all people regarded themselves as working class, which the people who did the survey say is phenomenal, extraordinary, especially in view of the barrage of propaganda that we're all middle class now and the old class divisions don't exist, and so on and so forth.
05:10 I think, though, [there is] one aspect that we have to look at, and often I think people on the left are very loath to look at it and to recognise the full dimensions of it, and that is the cultural change as a result of relative working-class retreat since the 1980s. And the cultural changes, I think, [are] sometimes summed up as dumbing down, sometimes summed up as celebrity culture. The obsession with celebrity — there have always been stars, there's always been the Hollywood star system, but this mania for celebrity, this obsession, a society which is obsessed with people who are famous for being famous. And that's deep inside the youth.
06:14 Young people today — of course, they always were to a certain extent — [are] dominated by hedonistic ideas: the key thing to do is have a good time. That's what all young people want to do. And there's nothing wrong with having a good time, although sometimes I think it should be allowed by the Central Committee once or twice.
06:45 The rich and famous — another way of being obsessed with the rich and famous. For example, the left is very reluctant to look drug culture squarely in the eyes. Drug culture is universal; most young people — the drugs of choice are centrally connected with taking drugs that you have when you have sex at the same time. This dimension of it people don't like to discuss. It's very difficult to say [?] — people take drugs because they want to have a good time.
07:17 However, the whole collection of things, this hedonistic culture and celebrity culture, has caused massive, absolutely massive depoliticisation among the youth. And there is a massive crisis in the trade unions. Look at the TUC [?] — how many young people did you see get up and make speeches? What is the average age of a UNISON steward? Forty-seven plus. Forty-seven plus. And this problem of renewal is very important.
07:49 The other aspect of it that the article tries to take up — I had to write this very quickly in a morning, to replace an article that wasn't being written; I should have made more of this, but it's been done a lot better by lots of people — is the global recomposition of the working class. Because nothing looks more stupid now than André Gorz and all those people in the mid-1980s who wrote books saying goodbye to the working class. On a world scale it's a big hello to the working class, a massive hello to the working class. Probably the working class in China today is bigger than the working class in the whole of Western Europe was in the 1980s.
08:53 And this is the big story of the last twenty years of the twentieth century: the proletarianisation of vast sections of the peasantry. People compare this to the enclosure movement [?] in Britain and Scotland in the late Middle Ages, the early modern period. Paul Mason puts it like this in his book — which is a strangely titled book actually, *Live Working or Die Fighting*; bad choice, probably live working is the better option — he says that probably the future of the struggle for socialism is going to be determined in the next twenty years by what happens in China.
09:24 Now that may be an exaggeration, but nonetheless I think there's an important element of truth [in it]. It will just be a huge new working class. But it still all depends — the outcome ultimately depends on what happens in Britain, the United States and so on.
09:59 The problem again is the one of political representation, because there are huge working-class struggles that occur on a daily basis in China, and there are even academics who talk about the emergence of a new underground Chinese left. And they say, not unnaturally, [that] a lot of these kinds of things are going on, but they're not very open, and people have big illusions in Mao and the Mao period, and all that. Those are strong. And in general the formation of left organisations in Asia, inside this new working class, is quite a weak process.
11:04 But the idea that there's no working-class consciousness — ultimately a class for itself, in a complete sense, has to be a revolutionary class, which means that it's conscious of itself, and in that sense there's not a class for itself. That's obviously true, but that's true always outside of any revolutionary period.
11:35 And that's the problem: the problem of political representation. Sometimes the left has mechanical views of this: first of all you get the development of struggle, and then you get the development of political consciousness. But all the recent evidence, I think, is that the emergence of political formations which represent the working class in the political arena can actually be a spur to struggles, and intersect with new struggles. I think in the eighties that was the case in Brazil, and in the nineties that was the case in Italy to a certain extent.
12:08 Another dimension, which is almost completely absent from the article and which I'd put in much more prominently if I rewrote it today, is what's happening in Latin America. Because the idea that there's no consciousness in the Latin American working class and popular movements — the formulations by organisations of the Latin American left are very sophisticated. They don't just talk about the working class; the typical slogan is *obrero, campesino, indígena y popular* — workers, peasants, indigenous and popular, "popular" being everybody else oppressed that we haven't thought of, who goes into that category. But the working class is still in that conception, and obviously the working class is central in Bolivia and in Venezuela.
13:11 The other aspect which is very weak in the article is what we've discussed a lot: what is the ideological antidote to consumerism and crass celebrity culture and the cult of luxury and all that kind of stuff? What we have discussed over the last two years is that the ideological thing which is most damaging to that, and can have most appeal amongst the youth, is the environmental struggle. Because all of this swivelling of production towards luxury production under neoliberalism is immensely damaging to the environment and immensely wasteful, and the environmental movement provides the outlines of a conception of a different way of organising everyday life. And again, in my view the left has been — I'm not saying we haven't said anything about it, but we've been quite weak on that question.
14:15 So: has working-class consciousness declined? Yes — especially in the United States it's a long [decline], and to a certain extent in some European countries as well, and certainly in Japan since the forties and fifties. Has it completely collapsed? That's an obvious exaggeration. And there [is] massive potential for the development of class consciousness and class struggle in the new working class globally, even if that is as yet in its embryonic phase.
14:46 Chair: Right, thanks a lot, Phil. [We'll] just open up for questions [and] contributions.
---