Is There a "New Working Class"?

...Students increasingly resent the fact that modern society seems incapable of providing meaningful work and participation in decision-making...

...They were present in the writings of some Bolsheviks and Rosa Luxemburg...

...It represents instead the inchoate early struggles of "a class in the process of becoming," mostly unaware of its own needs and acting archaically or irrationally...

...It is important to distinguish between the effect of mass university education, primarily a post-World War II phenomenon, and the older discontent of unemployed university graduates centered on status demands and often associated with right-wing movements...

...Nor is it in essence rooted in a conflict of generations...

...Today a new meaning can be given to demands to extend democracy to all aspects of social and political life—and the technical skills and education of the new working class equip it to challenge the monopoly of expertise of the old elites...

...it was the instinctive response of the working class in Spain at the opening of the Civil War...

...Each sees the industrial working class as passive and, if anything, conservative...

...I say, however, that the new working class must help transform the labor movement and can become a significant social force only in alliance with sections of the old working class...

...With the new working class, however, the skills of the workers, whether utilized or not, are so often superior to those of the lower, middle and sometimes even higher management that authority derives from the organizational structure alone...

...Democratic socialist critics of the irrational and putschist rhetoric of the student radicals have too often criticized them in the name of old platforms and unexciting vistas of endless drudgery for the demands developed in a different era...

...Because of their strategic position, small groups of highly-skilled workers can often paralyze entire plants...

...Whole generations trained to think in terms of societal issues are offered roles as powerless, if well-paid, employees...

...1I THIS CHANGE in the role of universities reflects new needs of the economy: needs for increasing numbers of salaried people with technical and bureaucratic skills who will be dependent on institutions in which they hold no power...

...IV IN FRANCE IN 1968 AND ITALY IN 1970, the most militant strikers came from areas with the most advanced technology and the highest proportion of highly skilled or educated workers in electronics, chemistry, auto, aircraft, as well as from previously passive "middle-class" professions—teaching and journalism...

...This has profound implications for any analysis of student rebellions and "middleclass" discontent, but even more for the trade-union and socialist movements...

...For what can one do today with an West Germany: 44 East Germany: 62 Italy: 58 Switzerland: 55 2 Martin Trow, "Reflections on the Transition from Mass to Universal Higher Education," Daedalus, Winter 1970, pp...

...The concept of the New Working Class used here relates primarily to the work of Serge Mallet and, to a lesser extent, tothat of Andre Gortz...

...the universities has an even more explosive potential—unless, of course, we assume an infinite capacity of those regimes to absorb and buy off their university-trained cadres...

...I would like to suggest in a crude parallel that the direction of student discontent toward the universities is analogous...

...But with them, too, promise evoked by higher education clashes with the result, which is often workcompartmentalized to a degree that an older generation of university graduates would find unrecognizable...

...Though centralism was viewed not as antithetical to democracy but as an instrument against local, entrenched power, it did lead to neglect of the content and day-to-day organization of power...

...Seemingly divergent strands—massive discontent among students in most industrial societies— a decrease in the independence of profes ' This is even more striking in Eastern Europe where the political "skills" of the managers of nationalized enterprises are, if anything, more anachronistic than the training of their opposite numbers in the West...

...We should remember 3 The most cogent discussion of the theories of the new working class is to be found in Serge Mallet, La Nouvelle Classe Ouvriere, Paris: Seuil, 1969...

...In a way, both New Left utopianism and the increasing reformism of the mass work ing-class parties in Western Europe are based on the same analysis of the role of the old working class...

...This discontent will probably reach students in the technical sciences later than those in the social sciences, if only because the latter have been trained to generalize ideas and societal issues...

...While this term has been used in the United States, 5 it is generally counterposed to the more traditional stress on the working class as agency for social change...

...Its central view is that at least in the advanced industrialized countries, "socialism" can and should be imposed by marginal revolutionary minorities on a generally reactionary majority—and particularly against the desires of a working class seen as the core of this reaction...

...that the Luddites were an anachronistic expression of a then new working class in the process of being formed out of the old crafts...

...Workers' control was not only central to the demands of the Workers' Opposition in the early Bolshevik period...

...Leaving the university after graduation comes to seem increasingly unattractive, since meaningful work in terms of their own education, particularly for students of the social sciences and humanities, is hard to find...

...3 One root of student discontent lies in this shift of role...

...They reach a pessimistic view of the possibilities for social change deriving from the action of the industrial working class, and therefore become either de-facto liberal reformers or seek a different agency for social change...

...A theory of social change based on revolt of both the external colonies and internal marginal groups—either as yet unsocialized, as in the case of the students, or economically marginal, as in the case of the sub-proletariat—may sound extremely "radical...

...This militancy expresses itself not only in regard to wages and working conditions but also in regard to problems of control in the work process...

...The fleshing-out of demands to control one's community and work place can give radical intellectuals a focus...

...It was always more difficult to be a foreman or supervisor, to exercise authority over highly-skilled workers than over the unskilled, particularly when the skill of the workers and their knowledge of the work process was greater than that of lower-level management...

...but a sense of powerlessness at work combined with a 5 See Richard Flacks, "The Revolt of the Young Intelligentsia: Revolutionary Class Consciousness in Post Scarcity America," in Revolution Reconsidered (New York: Free Press...

...and Michael Harrington, "Whatever Happened to Socialism," Harper's, February 1970...

...and U.S.S.R., both East and West European countries are among those with a relatively large number of students: U.S.A.: 284 Yugoslavia: 105 U.S.S.R.: 183 France: 104 Canada: 164 Bulgaria: 101 Netherlands: 121 Denmark: 100 Australia: 116 Czechoslovakia: 96 Japan: 116 That this is a matter of social policy, more than of the general level of industrialization and ability to absorb university-trained personnel, is underlined by the figures for some other developed countries: high salaries and social mobility obtained through university education disguise their real loss of power and status...

...In France it was the previously Catholic trade unions (CFTU) rather than the Communistled CGT that repeatedly took the initiative in strikes and alone related sympathetically to the students during May 1968...

...The changing character of the work force and mode of production further creates an ever larger pool of workers who believe that they are capable of running the industry and at least those social organizations most relevant to their day-to-day lives...

...They are to be found in early Marx, in Bakunin, Proudhon, and Kropotkin...

...Yet, while graduate school postpones entry into the job market, it also increases the gap between the training one gets and the work one will do...

...III THE PROCESS, which makes unskilled and semi-skilled workers less powerful, makes many skilled workers more important...

...The CFTU's primary strength is in industries where the new rather than the old working class predominates...

...A working though imperfect model of workers' control and decentralization in Yugoslavia gives the discussion some reality...

...In all the modem industrial societies, power, after all, remains in the hands of the old elites...

...The shift in the authority of engineers and skilled scientists in industry also reduces them to a new highly-trained working class...

...The better-situated students in those disciplines increasingly accept the fact that their undergraduate degree is only a prerequisite for entering graduate schools...

...Today, renewed demands for workers' control reflect not only dissatisfaction of the workers in the nationalized industries of both Western and Eastern Europe with the old authoritarian structures...

...In Western Europe both the Social Democratic and Communist parties find that their bases of strength remain in the old working class, and these not only shrink numerically but become strategically less important...

...These analyses combine to give the New Left an unreal, temporary, marginal character—to fixate it as a form of kamikaze radicalism without hope of producing major social change, yet determined to make the (necessarily only moral) gesture...

...A sense of powerlessness is not sufficient for revolt...

...BOGDAN DENITCH feeling of power as a social group provides an impetus toward organized militancy...

...Their skills are a key to modem production, and not the often archaic skills of the managers and owners...

...It is a process that can be observed in advanced industrialized societies, both East and West...

...second, a view of student revolt as the symptom of a generational revolt rather than a reflection of major social shifts...

...Strikes of this kind indicate that relatively high wages do not succeed in buying off discontent...

...Not the university but their own new position in society is a major cause of student alienation, just as not the machine but the new social organization of work changed the role of the old craftsmen...

...On the whole question of just how central is the presence of objective historical forces are waged bitter polemics between Guevarists and Marxists in Latin America...

...Workers in process-flow industry who maintain the ever more complex machinery, skilled workers in communication industries, IBM, electronics and even in some of the old trades—tool- and diemakers, plant electricians, and certain branches of the building trades—begin to converge with the technicians and younger engineers into a new working class...

...Two views are common in the New Left: first, a profound pessimism about the possibilities of mobilizing mass support, which sees the working class as bought off by the consumer-oriented society or even racist and reactionary...

...V A MAJOR DIVIDING LINE between Marxist and non-Marxist radicals has always been the insistence of Marxists that forces for social transformation had to exist in the society itself...

...A traditional way of handling this problem in such trades as printing, tooland diemaking, etc., has been to have "working foremen" who were members of the union and organizers of tasks rather than managers of men...

...They represent an early phase in the developing consciousness of a stratum in modem industrial societies which can be described as a "new working class...

...Far from temporary, the wave of student radicalism is neither localized in respect to political issues (an end to the Vietnam War might not reduce student rebellion in the U.S...

...The post-World War II expansion of universities has coincided with a growing demand for university graduates...

...A major intellectual debt to Lucien Goldmann is gratefully acknowledged...

...Few of the oppositionists use New Left rhetoric, and if some small circles of intellectuals may have absorbed the "new and modern" view that the working class is reactionary and coopted, it is an illusion that no regime dares have...

...The process has advanced farthest in the United States,2 though a number of factors make awareness of it clearer in France and some East European countries...

...it is the issue that led Kautsky to attack the Bolsheviks as neo-Jacobins...

...This discontent is most clearly articulated in the social sciences and humanities, where the training one gets—the ability to critically analyze institutions and ideologies—has little relationship to the work one will end up doing...

...But, implicitly, it rejects the view that conscious and voluntary action of the majority in its own name and interests is either a possible or, for that matter, desirable way to achieve a socialist society...

...4 The rationality of factory organization and the legitimacy of discipline are threatened when they seem based not on superior knowledge but on institutional power alone...

...nor centered on the organization of universities...

...E.g., recent studies in Poland and Yugoslavia show that most managers who have a university degree tend to have a general law or economics degree...

...Thus the immediate authority faced by the worker was half-voluntary, subject to his democratic organization and therefore legitimate...

...For the latter, understanding and relating to this process is a matter of life and death...

...In Prague in 1968 workers called for workers' councils and a real say in day-today decisions over production, while intellectuals centered on intellectual freedoms...

...This is a draft of an essay to appear in Radical Sociology, J. David Colfax and Jack L. Roach, editors, to be published by Basic Books...

...In many countries the highly skilled workers have developed a great deal of control over the work pace and process, eliminating lower management entirely...

...V1 WHAT UNDERLINES THE RELEVANCE of the growing layer of technically and intellectually trained workers is that they are also to be found in the one-party "socialisms" of Eastern Europe where massive growth of IS THERE A "NEW WORKING CLASS...

...For those from the technical sciences a recognition of their real status may come only at work, where they will be joining portions of the old industrial working class whose skills and training also move them toward the creation of a new group of highly-skilled technicians...

...Nationalization of the means of production was seen by the Left primarily as depriving the old ruling classes of its economic power, but not as fundamentally changing work relations inside the newly nationalized industry...

...A new working class, indispensable to modern economies, has a potential social weight greater than its actual numbers, which, in any case, are growing...

...Characteristic of these strikes is a stress on democracy at the point of production rather than mere traditional wage demands...

...this sprawling system of some 2,500 colleges and universities enrolls over 40 per cent of the age grade, over 50 per cent of all high school graduates and those proportions are steadily rising...

...Students have sometimes been called neo-Luddites...

...Students of working-class or lower-middle-class origin tend to accept the university environment, since for them it does represent a major chance for social advance...

...Two results follow...

...There is a peculiar continuity between the New Left attempt to identify the young intelligenstia as the major group potentially committed to radical social change and the decades-old liberal stress on middle-class liberals as the active political element...

...Both agree that the traditional working class is passive and will remain so...

...Relatively 1 Recent UNESCO figures on the number of students per 10,000 inhabitants indicate that after the U.S...

...And a fertile ground is created for hostility toward a society that seems incapable of assuring satisfying work even to university graduates...

...Those with specific skills find their work compartmentalized and routinized...

...BOGDAN DENITCH undergraduate degree in the social sciences or the humanities...

...They are harder to train and replace...

...From an elite education for sons of notables preparing to assume leading roles, there is a turn to vocational training and, also, to an imprecise rite of passage designed to prepare technicians and white-collar workers for a bureaucratized economy...

...Student discontent is, in my view, only a harbinger of the discontent of a new and growing class...

...they were striking out in a socially irrelevant way at symbols of their new status marking the end of their old role...

...Subjective desires of would-be revolutionists could never be enough...

...However, it is also true that most of the European Left parties, including Communists after the victory of Stalin, have borrowed heavily from the Jacobin tradition of revolutionary centralism...

...It also forms a platform from which the utopian and elitist views current in so much of the student New Left can be confronted...

...Demands for workers' control or workers' councils are of course not new...

...This trend has reduced many of the old-style professionals to paid employees of institutions...

...sionals, the "proletarianization" of many technicians and engineers, the increasing militancy of strategically-placed groups of skilled workers (particularly in Western Europe)—are interconnected...

...MASS UNIVERSITY EDUCATION, in the advanced industrial countries,' is leading to a shift in the function and character of university-educated personnel...

...Around this issue center most of the polemics between Marx and Bakunin...

...In some large states like California, where roughly 80 per cent of high school graduates go on to some form of higher education, our system of higher education begins to be very nearly universal...

...not all graduate students, after all, choose academic careers...

...it is neither reasonable nor legitimate...

...This is perhaps the reason why the demands there are so much clearer at this time: democratization of major institutions (the government, mass organizations and party) or a multiparty system, and self-managment or workers' control of enterprises...

...The reluctance of the Prague liberals to introduce workers' councils may go a long way to explain the relative indifference to the early phase of the Russian occupation by the same workers who, through massive slowdown, continued the struggle long after many intellectuals had left the country or had become silent...

...For them, too, the gap between capabilities and decision-making becomes increasingly less rational, for often they are as competent to make day-to-day decisions as the foremen IS THERE A "NEW WORKING CLASS"1 and management...

...The demand for some form of worker's control increasingly characterizes the strikes in Europe—and it is raised by the most skilled workers and technicians, more often than not against the desire of the union leaders and parties of the Left...

...The irrationality and inefficiency, not to speak of the brutality, of the East European societies is more "pure" than that of the welfare capitalism of the West...