OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS

...334 MICHAEL HARRINGTON Still, two momentous events had taken place in the '20s...

...There is, for instance, no question that the intrapersonal culture of the working class has been largely subverted by such changes in class structure as the movement of workers to the suburbs or the achievement of limited access to the consumption-oriented (and rigged) society...

...society and has done more to raise the living standard of black Americans than any force, except the federal government...

...OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS 335 cinating book, Americanism had become a kind of "substitutive socialism...

...In 1920 the AFL was in favor of public ownership of the utilities, organization of cooperatives, and workmen's compensation...

...In 1969 the Bureau of Labor Statistics computed a "modest" budget for an urban family of four at $9,076, an amount in excess of the income of well over half the families in the United States...

...he can live in his own house in a "middle class" estate or suburb and still remain little involved in white-collar social worlds...

...Butonce we grant the apparent uniqueness of American capitalism, is it indeed true that class consciousness failed to play an important, much less a decisive, role in the nation's history...

...Some "new men" might join a progressive political coalition in their off-duty hours but, under present conditions, their working lives will be dominated by corporate values that oppose, or at least would severely limit, any restrictions on the company's freedom of action...

...Werner Sombart's famous remark that socialism in America ran aground "on shoals of roast 'beef and apple pie" was made in 1906 and has survived as a myth until this day...

...It was not simply that the historic factors identified by Perlman were at work...

...Third, there are a number of more nebulous categories...

...Certainly when Washington's cutbacks coincided, not accidentally, with the Nixon recession of the early '70s, there were extremely high rates of unemployment among the educated, including Ph.D.s with scientific and engineering degrees...

...In September of 1969 the "average production worker" took home OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS 329 $102.44 for a full week's work, and manufacturing workers, most of whom were organized, only received $106.75...

...In a famous letter to Engels in 1858 in which he outlined Das Kapital, he indicated that the culmination of his analysis—which was never written— would deal with "stock capital as the most developed form [of capitalism] with all its contradictions...

...are] class interests...

...They recognized that, even though the worker insisted upon his loyalty to the American ideal, he was reading it in terms of his own class needs...

...state "right to work" laws...

...The organized workers are, in short, not one thing...

...The only category of industrial workers that will be in both absolute and relative decline over that period is that of the nonfarm laborers, which is supposed to fall from 3.6 million to 3.5 million...

...And Alain Touraine writes, "it is anachronistic to depict social armies confronting each other...

...Its class consciousness lies somewhere between the polar extremes of revolutionary transformation and interest politics...

...Yet the objective indices show that in the United States as in England the worker is not an integrated participant in affluence but a member of a quite distinct stratum...

...It would give huge sums of money belonging to the people of the United States to big corporations...

...There is a social chasm between these groups, not the infinite gradations postulated by Clark Kerr...

...indeed, they permit one to speak of a "new working class" so long as it is understood that the phrase cannot be taken -as a precise definition...

...So in the '30s there emerged a mass political movement based upon class institutions (the unions) which demanded, not simply narrow legislation related to the needs of this or that trade or craft, but a mode of planned social organization that would give priority to the value of full employment...

...The trade unionists, most of whom are among the betteroff members of the "old" working class, do not achieve this standard: they are neither poor nor affluent but in-between and distinctly deprived...

...This point must be stressed because many scholarly critics of the notion of a class struggle in the U.S...

...He would do this at the expense of the poor, the state and local governments and their employees and wage and salary earners...

...Yet labor maximized its long-range political program by standing fast on one man/one vote rather than giving priority to its short-range organizational goals...

...Beyond that, as Leon Samson has argued in a fas* Those who wish to downgrade this speech usually argue that Marx was making pragmatic political concessions to the British trade unionists who were so important to him in the First International...

...Perhaps the exigencies of the future will deepen the best impulses within the labor movement, and I am on the side of those within it who are fighting for such a development...

...did Marx fail to include this material in his own theory of class...

...In 1940, only 37.8 percent of Americans between 25 and 29 years of age had completed four years of high school or more...

...Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., an activist liberal, says that the lines of division in our politics have fundamentally altered...

...Second, almost 'all of them 'are in jobs directly depen342 MICHAEL HARRINGTON dent upon the political process, and this means that their notion of collective bargaining includes political action from the very outset (indeed, the NEA lobbied long before it began to bargain...

...But if the American workers thus committed themselves to "the social control of production through intelligence and foresight, which is the political economy of the working class," they did not call this policy "socialist...

...There is no question that a momentous transformation of the American class structure is taking place...

...That has its positive side, as Herbert Gans discovered in his study of Levittown...

...Second, there are the educated workers in the service industry, a category that will expand at much better than the average rate (45 percent as against 25 percent) for the decade...

...a system of mixed economy and of political pluralism...

...The answer, I believe, is embarrassingly oldfashioned...

...In 1968, for instance, the polls indicated significant support for George Wallace among young white workers in the North during the early fall...

...That hope has been around for years and was brilliantly formulated by Thorstein Veblen in his essay collection The Engineers and the Price System, which dates back to 1919...

...These developments did not, for the reasons Perlman described among others, take place in the guise of a socialist class consciousness...

...and labor was now part of a new urban majority...

...Why, then, profound transformations in the structure of the advanced economies—some of them unforeseen by even so perspicacious a thinker as Marx—what is it that makes the workers I have just described more likely to join unions than any group in society...

...One suspects that their plight was a consequence of America's refusal to face up to the revolutionary character of its technology, and disguising what would have been middleclass unemployment as middle-class education...

...II First of all, consider the "old" working class: the primarily blue-collar workers who do physical labor in the industrial economy...

...But that, as we have just seen, is a misleading simplification...

...When William English Walling popularized Kautsky's views in 1912, he spoke of the possibility of winning the professional classes, the salaried corporation employees, and is large part of the office workers to socialism...

...But hardly had the end of ideology been proclaimed than the most tumultuous ideological decade in recent history began—the 1960s...

...The "new middle class" was an educated salariat, and it was noted by Karl Kautsky as early as the 1890s...

...The theorists of industrial, or...

...OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS 337 THE UNIONS thus became a political class force, even if in a fairly undramatic way...

...MEW, XXIX, p. 312...

...The AFL–CIO was here articulating what Marx called "the political economy of the working class" as it applies in a post-Keynesian society...

...Selig Perlman provided part of the answer in his seminal Theory of The Labor Movement: American labor remains the most heterogeneous laboring class in existence---ethnically, religiously and culturally...

...Yet there are crucial elements of workingclass life—relative deprivation, the impersonality of the work process, greater susceptibility to layoffs than experienced by other groups in the society, group wages— which remain and are the objective determinants of the class itself...

...There are serious scholars who argue that it no longer exists in America...

...For if it is indeed true that economic decisions will be increasingly made by a political rather than a market process...

...And it is obvious that in many aspects oftheir life, above all in their education and income, most of these people more clearly resemble the salaried middle class than •the working class...

...But before that can be attempted, I must define a vexing term: the working class...

...Their family backgrounds, education, and income make them a part of the traditional working class...

...It has renewed itself in the last quarter of a century and become a greater force in American politics than at any time in the nation's history...

...The middle levels of management, particularly in the modern corporations, are not so easy to define and will be discussed at greater length in the section on the "new" working class...

...Perlman was right: heterogeneity made it impossible to organize the great mass of the newly arriving European workers until the '30s and acted, in -a thousand different ways, to impede consciousness of membership in a single and united class...

...ALL of this should not be taken as implying extreme optimism about a future in which a still dynamic old working class will join with the organized new working class to make the good society...

...As Bennet Berger has documented, it is only in the old working-class neighborhoods, usually ethnic in character, that one finds a face-to-face and daily sense of a common class plight...

...There are already 2 million of them, including schoolteachers in the National Education Association, nurses who belong to associations carrying out "job actions," people who belong to what Bok and Dunlop call "near unions...

...Nixon had proposed a federal job cut and a retreat from welfare reform, strict wage controls, vague price controls, and no limit on profits, dividends, and other forms of upper-class compensation...

...Daniel Bell and John Kenneth Galbraith, whose "educationalscientific estate" is another name for the "new men," assume that these educated and generally liberal administrators of power will be able to pursue their own goals...

...Of these, about 40 percent are technicians who will not have been to college but will have received post-high school training or have -acquired sophisticated skills on the job...

...Still, it seems obvious today, in contrast to a generation or two ago, that the worker does not enter a class community when he leaves the factory but rather participates more and more in the nonclass world of consumption...

...Yet Perlman was wrong: even in the '20s when he wrote, and much more so later on, the workers were constantly forced by the exigencies of their class situation to go beyond "wage and job control" and raise class issues about the organization of the entire society...

...Ordinarily, one would have expected the unions to have grown and bettered their wages and working conditions during prosperity, but the influx of farmers, who could be satisfied by cheap wages and were suspicious of group action, depressed the labor market...

...Every governmental projection indicates a substantial increase during the next decade in the number of Americans who live under such conditions...

...But, like the professional and educated personnel in this area, they also are highly motivated to become active in politics...

...In 1980, according to the projection of the Department of Labor, there will be 15.5 million professional and technical workers and 15.4 million operatives (assemblers, truck drivers, bus drivers) . That obviously describes a profound shiftaway from the industrial proletariat of semiskilled workers...

...The American working class was no longer a port of entry for millions of the foreign-born and was becoming, for the first time in its history, homogeneous...

...This kind of collectivism is far from the romantic Marxian consciousness as defined by Aron, but it is distinctive and clearly goes beyond narrow organizational interests...

...Its members work, for the most part, in public, or semipublic sectors--education, health, social services, defense and defense-related industries, aerospace—and they are therefore dependent on federal political decisions for their economic wellbeing...

...private household workers (15 percent) ; operatives (10 percent) ; nonfarm laborers (0.2 percent) and farm workers (0.33 percent...

...In his famous Inaugural Address to the International Workingmen's Association, Marx spoke of a campaign to restrict the working day to ten hours in England as "a struggle between the blind rule of supply 'and demand, which is the political economy of the middle class, and the social control of production through intelligence and foresight, which is the political economy of the working class...

...1, p. 190...

...But it does not thereby happen that, on the strictly economic plane, the group of workers and the group of capitalists oppose one another in a fight to the death, each one having an essential interest opposed to the other...

...It is on the basis of this analysis that Bell has been writing about a "post-industrial" society in which the decisive "new men" are the scientists, the mathematicians, the economists and the engineers of the new computer technology...

...What predisposes them toward a certain political point of view...

...At certain points in his writing that phrase referred to the disappearance of grandiose simplifications about society, a happy event from any point of view...

...Economic life could be a non zero-sum game...

...There are two major lines of argument, sometimes convergent, which hold that, even though there may be objective determinants of class in America, there has either never been or cannot now be any significant mass consciousness of that fact, moving workers to political or socialaction...

...The joint stock company, Ralf Dahrendorf holds, separated ownership and control and thereby obviated a theory of class determined by property or the lack of it...

...24, 27, 33...

...It is the result, not of instinct or intuition...

...In 1971 Daniel Bell, who only a decade earlier had talked of the end of ideology, wrote, It seems clear to me that, today, we in America are moving away from a society based on a private enterprise market system toward one in which the most important economic decisions will be made at the political level, in terms of consciously defined "goals" and "priorities...

...And] the workers, whose grievances were once the driving energy for social change, are more satisfied with the society than the intellectuals...

...But the unions increasingly have become an organized component of the Democratic party...

...The "modest" standard, it must be emphasized, lives up to its name: it allows for a two-year-old used car and a new suit every four years...

...But of the rest only 8 percent were thinking about going into business...

...Richard Hofstadter, one of the few scholars to recognize the importance of this fact, wrote, "The demands of a large and powerful labor movement combined with the interests of the unemployed, gave the New Deal a social democratic tinge that had never before been present in American reform movements...

...These figures mean, among other things, that many children of the working class are now going to college...

...Indeed, if one compares Germany and OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS 333 the United States between 1890 and 1914, the workers experienced steadily a relative rise in their living standards in the country that produced a mass social democratic movement rather than in the one that did not...

...BUT EVEN WITH these qualifications, it is clear that the new technology is calling into life a new class structure...

...In Toward a Democratic Left I spoke of these people as a "new class"rather than a "new working class" because I wanted to stress the discontinuities signaled by their appearance...

...But in between those limits there is a large new grouping, numbered in the millions, which, for all its middle-class education and income, is impelled by virtue of its position in society toward collective bargaining and politics...

...This change in their own class position may have made them less sensitive to the daily struggles of less favored people...

...So it is that these managers must be counted among the golden elite, the 6 1/a percent of the American consumer units which, in December 1962 (there has been no downward redistribution since), had incomes of $50,000 a year or more and owned 57 percent of the wealth of the society...

...For Raymond Aron, a seminal theorist of the notion of "industrial society" (i.e., of consensus capitalism), the class struggle only exists where there is a "fight to the death" between workers and capitalists which eventuates in violence...

...or they could respond to a movement for democratic and social planning...

...Indeed, the very fact of being paid a wage by the hour emphasizes another determinant of workingclass existence, the vulnerability of the job to the vagaries of the business cycle, the ever-present possibility of being laid off...

...For reasons of space, we are omitting the long section of references that concluded this article.—ED...

...V Raymond Aron was an early advocate of this view...

...Big corporations, which tend' to be Republican, usually maintain a "Democratic" vice-president to insure access to the White House no matter what...

...VI This working class, very different from the one studied by Marx, is at the moment going through a new mutation---one that has given rise to theories about a "new" working class...

...This project subjected the thesis of the embourgeoisement of the working class in that country to a careful empirical examination...

...As we pass from societies of accumulation to programmed societies, relationships of power become increasingly more important than opposition between social groups...

...in 1970 that percentage had jumped to 75.4 ,percent...

...Given the obvious exigencies of the situation, the workers were committed as a class—and, with the elections of 1936, organized as a class—to win full-employment policies requiring that the government manage the economy...

...He holds that "the working class not only tends to disappear as a class-conscious and recognizable element in society...

...I am not in search of a rhetoric but want to describe how workers behave politically in order to maximize goals which go beyond their immediate self-interest, or even the narrow advantage of their craft and skill, and which have to do with the needs of the entire class and through it of the nation itself...

...The tremendous growth in professional and technical employment was, in part at least, 340 MICHAEL HARRINGTON caused by federal outlays in space, defense, and education, all of which were cut back in the late '60s...

...At stake here is not simply the annual pay but, in Herman Miller's definition of wealth, "the sum total of equity in a home or business, liquid assets, investment assets, the value of automobiles owned and miscellaneous assets held in trust, loans to individuals, oil royalties, etc...

...In part, as Penn Kemble has ,argued, the vantage point of intellectual perception has changed radically during the past 30 years...

...For instance, the Italian workers who were jammed together in New York before and after World War I were more loyal to their village in the old country, and to the padroni who exploited them here, than to their class...

...It is a failure to confront this complex reality that makes Derek Bok and John T. Dunlop miss the significance of trade union political action in their study of Labor and the American Community...

...Or, to take Aron's criterion of the most crucial precondition for the existence of a social class, was there a consciousness on the part 336 MICHAEL HARRINGTON of those American workers that "their class has a unique destiny and that it cannot fulfill its vocation except by transforming the totality [ensemble] of the social organization...

...Arid this stratum, for •the most part, is neither poor nor modestly well off, indeed is better off then ever before yet still quite deprived...

...But if it was not prosperity that prevented the development of a socialist class consciousness in America, what was...

...It is, however, important to note that there is one basic oversimplification in the Inaugural...

...Daniel Bell transposed Aron's thesis for America...

...In 1969, only 23.7 percent of the family heads of students in college had themselves received a degree, which means they lacked a crucial precondition for middleclass status...

...OLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS 331 More generally, the nonowning managers at the top of the society accumulate wealth...

...There was, he said in the 1950s, an end of ideology...

...As David Greenstone documents in his book Labor in American Politics, "the emergence of organized labor as a major, nationwide electoral organization of the national Democratic Party was the most important change in the structure of the American party system during the last quarter of a century...

...Moreover, the corporations tend to favor reactionary Keynesianism, in which the ecoomy is stimulated by incentives to capital rather than through the meeting of human needs, which is social Keynesianism...

...He further proposed an investment tax credit on machinery produced by American companies, a measure that might give business a $5 billion benefit (which would have to be added to the better than $3 billion a year earlier offered by the President in the form of accelerated depreciation for the corporations...

...Yet there were some specific circumstances in the '60s that might have made these trends seem even more vigorous than they actually are...

...Notwithstanding its tendencies toward ethnocentrism and antiintellectualism, the labor movement has provided a decisive political impetus for whatever democratic planning there is in America...

...Even in the area of race, where so many observers tend to pit blacks against the unions, labor is the single most integrated institution in U.S...

...but of class position...

...Yet, when one turns to families with incomes in the general AFL–CIO range, the magnitude of the present social change becomes even more evident...

...In this country, as distinct from Europe, bourgeois ideology itself stressed equality, classlessness, and the opportunity to share in wealth...

...One of the most important subcategories of this group includes engineers and scientific technicians...

...have unwittingly adopted, not simply a Marxi'an definition of the concept, but a "romantic" Marxian definition...

...An almost equal number of the "near poor" (who include more whites and tend more to live in families headed by a male than do the poor themselves) were largely outside the unions...

...There was little rhetoric of class war...

...These trends are much too recent to survey in any but the most superficial of fashions, yet it is likely that the possibilities for legal and medical practice among the poor and the minorities, so important to these students and the young graduates, will depend upon federal decisions with regard to the fight against poverty and national health care...

...It is pure hypocrisy to think that they are always resolved in an equitable fashion, pure hypocrisy to deny a struggle over the division of the national income...

...TO BEGIN with, in the upper reaches of the society property is not quite so passe as the notion of a clear-cut "separation" of ownership and control suggests...

...In the revised edition of his famous popularization of Marxism, Anti-Duhring, Engels was even more emphatic on this count...

...But that stratum does not concern us here...

...In the third volume of Das Kapital, Marx did refer briefly to the separation of ownership and control, and Engels added a note when he published the volume after Marx's death saying that this trend had become even more important...

...The rich were, to be sure, disproportionately represented in higher education: 66 percent of the families with incomes of over $15,000 a year had a child in college in 1969, and 16.4 percent of those with incomes under $3,000...

...But the reason for this reversal involved a trend that was to prepare the way for the great explosion of working-class militancy in the '30s...

...Yet there are important parallels between the new strata and the traditional working class...

...Among the unorganized one would find the working poor, who numbered close to 4 million in 1969 according to the government's optimistic definition of poverty...

...But these statistics are of little political and intellectual significance if they simply describe unrelated facts about an inert mass...

...The new stratum on which we focus is not based upon property or employment in the private corporation...

...There is every reason to expect that they will continue their present tendencies toward job organization and political involvement...

...they are a varied, dynamic, contradictory mass whose position in society can ._drive its members toward a practical social idealism, an -antisocial corporatism, or any one of the complicated variants between those extremes...

...In the present context my focus will be upon those factors which drive such professionals, technicians, and others in a trade union direction—toward collective bargaining on the job and political pressure for full-employment policies outside the job...

...Herbert Marcuse, who had a notable influence on the New Left youth of the 1960s, writes that "'the people,' previously the ferment of social change, have `moved up' to become the ferment of social cohesion...

...The kind of class struggle envisioned in The Manifesto did not emerge in the America of the 1930s or since...

...This signified the organization of a class, not merely an interest group...

...Let me be more specific...

...Morris Hillquit, theorist of American socialism in the first third of the century, also talked of the "exceptional position" of America with its vast land mass, its prosperous agriculture, its tendency to make wage labor seem only a "temporary condition...

...The issues are no longer social or economic so much as they are cultural and moral...

...But even though death prevented Marx from formally and systematically revising the simplifications and errors of the Manifesto, it is clear that he understood that the class structure of his own time was being profoundly modified by the separation of ownership and control...

...But, I would add, in becoming more of a "citizen" he became less of a worker...

...MEW, XXVI, Pt...

...The theory that America has always been immune to the class struggle is the generalization of a profound half-truth...

...Still, the most sophisticated revision of the idea of the working class is based on a very real and momentous shift in class structure (a shift that is also, as will be seen, the key to the emergence of a "new" working class...

...Was this merely a case of groups struggling bitterly over the terms of a consensus...

...The war and postwar militancy had driven the average weekly wage in manufacture up to $26.30 in 1920, but in 1921 wages dropped •to $22.18 and in 1929 they had only reached $25.03, more than a dollar below the level of 1920...

...But the elections reveal the much more significant fact that by and large those same workers vote massively in national elections for the Democratic candidates endorsed by their union...

...To use Marx's famous distinction, the working class in this country is not simply a class "in itself"—a mass sharing "a common situation and common interests"— but it is a class "for itself" and the "interests which it defends...

...In both the law and medical schools of the late '60s and early '70s there was a demand for more relevant education, and resistance to such established professional organizations as the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association...

...The class-conscious movement of the '20s did not succeed and in the latter half of the decade there was a reversion to Gompers's "voluntarist" philosophy...

...They are not as easy to identify as the other groupings, yet they often have served as a cultural vanguard, and their presence should be noted...

...Most of the new strata members occupy subordinate positions in large production units, and this is the basis for the unionism and "near unionism" which has already developed among them...

...Finally, there are deep-going changes taking place in traditional professions...

...Now it is enough to note that this labor market is not anonymous, its salaries are not determined on a class basis, as in the case of workers, and it is less subject to the ups and downs of the business cycle...

...It did not, however, stop social class from becoming the most important single determinant in our political life...

...I must try to understand the past and present of the working class with as much candor as possible if I am to help those struggling to create its future...

...In the past there was an unspoken consensus and the public philosophy did not need to be articulated...

...And they would add that in the period after World War II changes in capitalist society led to the virtual disappearance of that class struggle...

...And since, as Brendan and Patricia Sexton have pointed out, the average trade unionist of today is getting younger, these percentages can be expected to go up as the children of those now youthful workers reach college age...

...It is no longer the common men against the boss as much as it is the rational against the indignant, the planner against the spoiler, the humanist against the uneducated, the young against the old...

...But my partisanship does not make me an apologist...

...What Bok and Dunlop miss, then, is the class political attitude of the workers which is not at all the same as, and sometimes even contradicts, the sum totals of their private views...

...it is growth whose necessary conditions correspond simultaneously to the interests of the managers and the employees...

...at the bottom, among the scientific technicians without college degrees, they merge with the more skilled members of the traditional working class...

...It might be more accurately described, to use a term employed by the British students of the affluent worker, as an "instrumental collectivism...

...In 1980, then, the "old" working class will be larger than ever before in American history...

...At the crudest this indifference could be rationalized by confusing the relative decline in manufacturing jobs—they accounted for 39.3 percent of nonagricultural employment in 1919 and only for 28.8 percent in 1969—with an absolute decrease in the number of workers and a consequent loss of political and social power...

...The choice of terms is not crucial...

...The conditions we describe as "American exceptionalism" slowed the emergence of that consciousness and even made its anticapitalism seem formally procapitalist...

...When Irving Louis Horowitz asks skeptically why the "interest-determined demands of the working class are somehow instincOLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS 339 tively and intuitively more progressive than those of other sectors," he overlooks the union's stand on such an issue...

...The old middle class was composed of men and women of property and income on a small scale...

...Even if one upgrades all of these numbers because of the enormous increase in the number of working wives-1 8 million of them in 1969, double the figure for 1950—who add an average of 25 percent to their family income, the total still falls short of the government's modest budget...

...The common interest of both, within the framework of the system [cadre du regime] is the prosperity of the enterprise and of the economy...

...I will deal with this historical error in a footnote, since it is not central to the main line of this analysis.* For even granting that there have been * In The Communist Manifesto, Marx unquestionably thought society was polarizing into a giant working class and a tiny bourgeoisie and held to a rather simplistic, property-determined theory of social class...

...A 1967 Fortune survey revealed that 30 percent of the 500 largest industrial concerns "are clearly controlled by identifiable individuals or by family groups...

...Those neither poor nor union members are most 'numerous in wholesale and retail trade, in finance, insurance, real estate, and the service industries...

...And the workers, most dramatically in France and Italy, but in America too, kept challenging the differential distribution of gains in strike after strike...

...High technology, he continues, requires consensus and cooperation and therefore cannot tolerate class conflict over basic principles...

...Somewhat more subtly, there were those who acknowledged the existence of the traditional working class but argued that it had become co-opted by the society and therefore lost its distinctive character...

...MEW XII, pp...

...This marks, Bell concludes, "a movement away from governance by political economy to governance by political philosophy...

...And this was a strength, for articulation often invites trials of force when implicit differences are made manifest...

...Almost a :third of the units in the $5,000–$7,499 group had a child in college, 41.8 percent of those in the $7,499–$9,999 group, and 49.0 percent of those with a $10,000–$15,000 annual income...

...English data cannot, of course, merely be imported to America and applied to the quite different variant of capitalism that exists here...

...As a significant number of such students and graduates realized that their education had no functional relationship to the society they were supposed to enter, they dropped out or sought alternative life-styles...

...Moreover, there are a good many indications that the unions will be forced to be even more political in the coming period...

...In part, the new patterns of education in the United States are a reflection of these changes in class...

...The analytic problem arises when one tries to make statements about the political and social behavior of the new strata...

...But at other points it announced a controversial trend: the disappearance from Western political life of debate and conflict over fundamental questions, a fading away of the very notion that there should or could be alternative forms of social organization...

...This notion was deepened, particularly by Engels, in response to Bismarckian "socialism" and led to the theory of "state socialism" in which government intervenes on behalf of the bourgeoisie...

...They are paid not as individuals but as members of a class: after the age of 25, the worker's income does not normally vary with increasing experience, as does that of professional and managerial employees, but usually rises as part of a negotiated group settlement...

...But as early as 1856, Marx, whom Dahrendorf charges with not having understood the importance of the joint stock company, wrote, "It cannot be denied that the application of the joint stock company to industry characterizes a new epoch in the economic life of modern nations...

...iV For all the dramatic struggles of the 1930s, it is clear in retrospect that the working class was not in a revolutionary mood...

...The liberal 'arts component of this surge was unplanned and, in some ways, irrational...

...It is not even 332 MICHAEL HARRINGTON necessary for my purposes that a majority of the workers use the term "working class" to describe their position in society...

...This error was sometimes abetted by a failure to explore the fine print in the governmental definitions in which, to take one pertinent example, laundry workers, garage repairmen, and dishwashers in the service industries are not classified as blue collar...

...The polls, I would suggest, do capture some private elements of workers' responses which in recent years have become more marked...

...Moreover, sincethese figures were computed, the cost of living has gone up by almost 20 percent and the real wage of the workers has slightly decreased...

...A preliminary warning: If one looks for a "European"-type class-consciousness in the United States—something like the attitude of that Frenchman, who, when T. S. Eliot accidentally jostled him, responded, "Me, I am a proletarian exploited by the capitalist class"—it cannot be found...

...That party alliance did not come about...

...They helped promote the organization of industrial workers in the CIO and were a major reason why a vast political movement based on class became a crucial feature of politics in the '30s...

...And by 1980 they will number in the millions...

...These theories are usually developed with the comment that Marx, fixated as he was upon a primitive model of capitalism, was unaware of such changes...

...But even in looking back, it is wrong to romanticize such working-class neighborhoods or to attribute to them, in Serge Mallet's phrase, a "pseudo-globalness...

...The board chairman of General Motors atthat time "only" owned 0.017 percent of the enterprise over which he presided—but that little fraction was worth $3.917 million...

...everyone could end up a winner, though with differential gains...

...Consequently, the only acceptable "consciousness" for American labor as a whole is "job consciousness" with a limited objective of "wage and job control...

...The labor movement—I sharpen the focus on the organized section of the working class contains more blacks than any other institution in American society, as well as more young whites attracted by the populist racism of George Wallace...

...Except for the last, all the labels fit...

...Which one of them prevails will determine much about the shape of the future...

...But they were a clear indication that workers were being driven to consider not simply their jobs but the society as 'a whole...

...It concluded that in England this cooptation simply had not taken place: A factory worker can double his living standards and still remain a man who sells his labour to an employer in return for wages...

...There were 20.210 million union members, mainly concentrated in machinery, transportation equipment, contract construction, and transportation services...

...The problem is that, from Veblen's day to this, the corporations have been profit-maximizers—more and more sophisticated in their definition of profit, to be sure —and have placed their own interests above those of the society or of the engineers who work for them...

...At the top of the income scale, particularly among the scientists and the engineers, the new strata shade off into the upper reaches of management...

...So by the early 1920s the majority of the AFL rebelled against Gompers's hostility to social legislation, adopted an approach very much like the one embodied in the socialist proposals that had been rejected during the 1890s, and embarked upon a course that led to an alliance with the Socialist party in the Conference for Progressive Political Action and support for the La Follette campaign in 1924...

...It is at this point that the politics of the American working class become crucial...

...In a much more recent statement of this theme Bell wrote that the secret of Western society was "productivity...

...Strangely enough, many scholars failed to take note of this significant phenomenon...

...As early as he mid-1850s, in his analysis of the "imperial socialism" of Napoleon III, Marx had understood that the conservatives and reactionaries could use collectivist methods to serve their own purposes...

...But the mature Marx did not hold this view and defined the class struggle in a far more subtle and complex fashion which can also serve as an excellent guide to the reality of the American 1930s—and '70s...

...For there is a working class "for itself' with a political consciousness that goes far beyond "job consciousness" and expresses itself in social reformism toward the society as a whole...

...They point out that, as recorded in the opinion polls, the workers have been giving decreasing support to union political action, and •that their unions have become more and more political...

...Yet when election day came, most of these same workers voted for Hubert Humphrey...

...Economic conflicts over wages and hours, he said, are quite real...

...This class consciousness is not revolutionary but, in practical and programmatic terms, it is remarkably similar to that found among the social democrats of Europe—even when it is sometimes couched in an antisocialist rhetoric...

...It is not based on that "world apart" of intrapersonal class values which existed at an earlier stage of capitalism...

...Lenin wrote of America (and Britain) that there were "exceptionally favorable conditions, in comparison with other countries, for the deepgoing and widespread development of capitalism...

...The differences between these two versions of Keynesianism is, I would suggest, both profound and systematic...

...These groups engage in collective bargaining and political action but refuse, often for reasons of status, to affiliate with the AFL-CIO...

...A country without a feudal past, possessing a vast continent to be settled once genocide had been committed against the Indians, and populated by successive waves of immigrants from the most varied European backgrounds, must differ in a number of crucial ways * What follows is a summary of a much more detailed, and documented, analysis to be found in my Socialism (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972...

...The pay is better now, the boom-and-bust rhythm has been attenuated, the famous built-in stabilizers, such as unemployment insurance, are at work...

...In recent years most of the liberal arts students have looked toward teaching as a career...

...Most of them had not changed their personal prejudices in the process, but they had understood that the exigencies of their class situation demanded they vote for a full-employment economy rather than against blacks i.e., for Humphrey, not Wallace...

...In any case, college-spending per student will not continue to increase faster than the Gross National Product, as it did in 1950-70...

...postindustrial, society might even grant this historical case...

...I think not...

...By that standard, the "nonowning" managers own quite a bit...

...Yet it can be demonstrated that American labor was by now more than a mere interest group...

...Such an idea can indeed be found in The Communist Manifesto, for it is a corollary of Marx's youthful error of supposing -that society was fast polarizing into only two classes...

...When asked to locate *themselves on a three-class scale of upper, middle, and lower, the overwhelming majority of Americans, including the members of the AFL—CIO, will say that they are middle-class...

...It may be that the workers, as Sweezy and Baran argue, want to be "integrated into the society as consumers," but it is surely of greater moment that the structure of injustice will not allow them, as a rule, even a "modest" income...

...They often enjoy special stock deals and other arrangements: in 1971 the Wall Street Journal reported that the biggest part of executive pay in the auto industry was a bonus based on the size of profits...

...In Fortune magazine's 1968 survey of the college campus, 40 percent of the "forerunners"—the two-fifths of the student body who had rejected the vocational school notion of the college—said that they were interested in teaching...

...They also ,tend to be employed by large organizations and often, for all their educational attainments, •they are subordinate participants in a hierarchical system...

...But, in a history of American labor (edited by that patriarch of the nonclass interpretation, J. R. Commons), Don Lescohier described as follows the two decades prior to World War I: Undergoing the vicissitudes of repeated periods of unemployment, experiencing in many occupations a less rapid rise of wages than living costs, [the wage earners] could see that while some groups, like the building mechanics, had made distinct progress, other groups, like the iron and steel workers, employees in meat packing plants, cotton mills, saw mills, tobacco and clothing factories had not held their own against the rapidly rising cost of living...

...In 1980, according to federal projections, there will be 1.4 million of them, an increase of 50 percent over the 1966 total, and a percentage that will be rising twice as fast as the national labor-force average...

...The old coal-mining towns of Appalachia would be the most obvious example of the vanishing conditions under which social class pervades all aspects of life...

...clerical workers (35 percent), and sales workers (30 percent...

...As Greenstone points out, they could have made a classic interest-group deal in the '60s...

...It is now apparent, even to its sophisticated devotees, that the free market is utterly incapable of 'allocating the resources of a technological society in 'a rational fashion...

...Those which will lag behind the national average are managers, officials, and proprietors (22 percent...

...The initial impact of this progressive turn of events was conservative...

...Among the 50 percent not Saocounted for by those two choices will be found drop-outs, life-style pioneers, artists, workers in communications, etc...

...Moreover, the chief factor inhibiting and distorting working-class self-consciousness was not, as is widely thought, the wealth of the society...

...On the one hand, it is said that the exceptional historical character of the national experience prevented the development of such a consciousness...

...If the question is posed in this way, so reminiscent of both the early Marx and the early Lukacs, then there was no class struggle in America...

...Yet, even as there were trends making the impact of classlessness pervasive in the daily life of the individual worker, the labor movement was moving into politics in a much more profound way than in the 1930s...

...By the end of the '60s, the AFL—CIO, the Auto Workers, and the Teamsters all supported an ongoing political apparatus which, in terms of money, lobbying, campaign workers, and the like, was a major factor in the United States...

...In addition to this deficiency in income, most of the union members are employed in manufacturing, construction, and transportation, i.e., in jobs with little intrinsic interest and, in the case of an assembly line in an auto plant, a dehumanizing routine...

...The categories exceeding that rate are professional and technical workers (50 percent...

...But there also is at least the possibility that the progressive tendencies in these two working classes, old and new, could provide the basis for a now political coalition in America dedicated to social and democratic— eventually perhaps social democratic —planning...

...Moreover in the posthumously published Theories of Surplus Value, Marx not only discussed the appearance of new middle strata linked to the phenomenon of the corporation but saw them as an inevitable outcome of the capitalist dynamic itself...

...There was, Bell said, a rough consensus among intellectuals on political issues: the acceptance of the Welfare State...

...On the other hand, it is claimed that the recent evolution of the American economy has produced a consensus in which interest groups compete over the details of the distribution of wealth but classes no longer contest more basic questions of the very mode of allocation itself...

...MEW, XX, p. 617...

...It is argued that economic classes defined by property relationships—entrepreneurs 330 MICHAEL HARRINGTON owning factories, shopkeepers their little businesses, farmers and peasants their plots of land, and workers possessing only their labor power to sell—have become obsolete...

...service workers (45 percent...

...The largest and most effective force in the society with a commitment to that kind of progressive Keynesianism is the trade union movement...

...First, there are those directly engaged in the development of technology, most of them classed as professional and technical workers...

...Part of the confusion over this momentous trend stems from 'a reliance on polling data in most academic accounts of the labor movement...

...In these pages I will try to do that by way of a broad overview of the organized and organizable working class...

...The AFL, as Philip Taft has written of the period, "found itself, against its wishes, propelled into more active political participation...

...The leadership of the new society will rest, not with business or corporations as we have known them (for a good deal of production will be routinized) 338 MICHAEL HARRINGTON but with the research corporation, the industrial laboratories, the experimental stations and the universities...

...the kind analyzed in the Inaugural Address has...

...Of these, 48.993 million were "production and nonsupervisory workers on private payrolls," with the 14.647 million in manufacturing the largest single component...

...Much of what Dahrendorf, and others, present as a critique of Marx is thus only Marxian common sense...

...Perhaps one of the best statements of this reality was made in the study of the English affluent worker carried out under the direction of John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood...

...The social critics of the 1960s and early '70s are relatively affluent compared to the marginality and even joblessness they had experienced during the Depression...

...For they had adopted, even when they were antisocialist, the criteria of the left wing of the Socialist party: that class consciousness must necessarily and exclusively take the form of allegiance to a socialist or workers' party...

...I disagree with those, from the authoritarian Left to the democratic Center, who think that the American working class does not exist (the Right, which I will not consider here, tends to have a vulgar-Marxist, or paranoid, version of the power of organized labor...

...If the AFL—CIO had agreed to let Everett Dirksen's Congressional override of the Supreme Court's one man/one vote rule go through, Dirksen would have permitted the repeal of the federal enabling clause for...

...So there is a distinct and identifiable universe of the working class even after one has taken into account the tremendous changes in class structure since Marx...

...The trade unionists and the "near unionists" in the service sector tend to be employed, or financed, by the public in education, health care, and the like...

...Perhaps the most emphatic statement of the theme comes from Clark Kerr, a brilliant, pragmatic technocrat...

...He concludes that in the advanced economies authority, not ownership, is central to the formation of social class...

...These trends are likely to continue and deepen in the future...

...Yet the very appearance of national health insurance as a political issue is primarily the result of a campaign waged for years by George Meany and Walter Reuther...

...He became less localistic and suspicious, more inclined to participate in civic and political life...

...And, as that survey pointed out, absolute numbers can be more revealing than percentages when one deals with the holdings of the executive officer of a multibilliondollar corporation...

...class consciousness did...

...The chairman of Chrysler, with a mere 0.117 percent of his company's stock, had a $2.380 million interest in the business...

...the desirability of decentralized power...

...Related to them, but not a part of the new strata, are the blue-collar workers in the public sector: policemen, firemen, hospital attendants, sanitation men...

...There was a brief period during and after the days of the Paris Commune when responding to Bakuninist critics on their Left and the vilifiers of the Commune on their Right, they seemed to turn back to the language and mood of the Manifesto...

...But the number of operatives and craftsmen will increase, and the unions that were created because of the common interest of this great mass are certain to grow in the foreseeable future into the largest membership organizations in the society...

...There are, as we have seen, status factors that can, and have, kept these groups far apart...

...These workers derive their livelihoods almost exclusively from the sale of their labor power on an anonymous, and uncertain, labor market and it is quite easy to distinguish them from their "fellow employees" who are corporation presidents or managers...

...But that was only an episode...

...Insofar as I deal with history, it will be in order to understand the current position of the unions and the various futures it could make possible...

...It is sobering to realize that Bell's "new men" and Galbraith's "educational and scientific estate" may have loomed somewhat larger than life because of the impact of such federal policies...

...the careful delineation of a new social reality is...

...The suburbanized worker, he learned, was not homogenized by the experience as much as critics of the 'S0s had thought...

...In the decade of the '70s government statisticians expect the labor force to grow by about 25 percent...

...they are opposed to a management of the economy that maximizes the interests of corporations...

...My conclusion, however, will be that there is not simply one working class in America but two—an old working class still quite vital and a new working class being created by political and economic evolution...

...So even though there are obvious differences between industrialists and file clerks, there are not "any clear class lines to divide them—only infinite gradations...

...So a more comprehensive Marxian development of the formulation in the Inaugural would emphasize that the "intelligence and foresight" would have to be exercised by and for the workers, not by and for Bonapartists, Bismarckians, fascists, Stalinists, Maoists, etc...

...So I speak of a new working class...

...it needs to disappear if modern industrial society is to -operate with full effectiveness...

...The railroad men were for the nationalization of their industry, and the Chicago Federation of Labor was in favor of a labor party...

...Marx-Engels, Werke [hereafter MEW], Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1953, XII, p. 33...

...but on a five-class scale, on which the working class is in between the poor and the middle class, many more will identify themselves as working class...

...Another 12.591 million were employed by federal, state, and local government, and many of them held down such blue-collar and organizable jobs as sanitation man or postman...

...We are dealing then with social categories in change, particularly when one talks of the liberal arts students and the radicals in the traditional professions...

...The answer is found on the last page of Volume III of Das Kapital...

...Today, however, there is a visible change from market to nonmarket political decision-making...

...It is therefore admirably suited to reflect the privatized area of a worker's mind, but what it omits—as elections do not—is the effect of his participation in -a workaday world, his membership in a class...

...Such action on the latter issue would have meant the successful culmination of a trade union campaign of more than two decades' duration...

...Precisely because I am concerned and involved, I cannot afford to gloss over tendencies that run counter to my hopes...

...In 1940, 5.8 percent of the 25-29 age group had four years of college or more, in 1970, 16.4 percent (the latter figure underestimates the recent increase in college degrees since it omits those between 21 and 25 in 1970, i.e., the age group with the highest percentage of graduates...

...A good number of these are, of course, white-collar workers, and not a few of them receive wage: increases from antiunion employers whenever organized labor in the industry, or the area, makes a gain...

...With a working class of such composition, to make socialism or communism the official "ism" of the movement would mean, even if other conditions permitted it, deliberately driving the Catholics, who are perhaps a majority in the American Federation of Labor, out of the labor movement, since with them an irreconcilable opposition to socialism is a matter of religious principle...

...There was a veritable explosion of ideology in the institutions of mass higher education in the advanced economies...

...One has to come to the second part of Marx's famous distinction: Is the "old" working class a class "for itself," does it act collectively from a consciousness of its position in society...

...But which values will determine the priorities of these new men...

...Once the discrepancy between low wages and high productivity in the '20s helped bring about the Great Depression, these developments were of enormous importance...

...It is an extraordinary thing that those who argue there is no working class in the United States can be found at the most disparate points of the political spectrum...

...The AFL–CIO Executive Council responded: Instead of extending the helping hand of the federal government to the poor, the unemployed, the financially strapped states and cities, and to the inflation-plagued consumer, the President decided to further enrich big corporations and banks...

...The workers have not achieved utopia but their expectations were less than those of the intellectuals and their gains correspondingly larger...

...if the question is how to manage the economy rather than whether to do so, then what mass force is there in society to fight for social values...

...Nixon's program is based on the infamous "trickle down" theory...

...Thus I would argue that, for all of its truly exceptional characteristics, American capitalism eventually forced its working class to become conscious of itself and to act as a major factor in political life...

...As the aero-space layoffs in 1970 and 1971 demonstrated, many of these workers are exceptionally vulnerable to policy shifts in Washington...

...They stand to gain from redistributionist federal policies favoring those either subafiuent or poor...

...There is a tendency toward corporatism in the new strata and in the old working class as well, with an emphasis on a very narrow and self-interested job protection...

...The automobile companies, to take a dramatic recent example, have been fighting auto safety and pollution controls for years...

...This response is rooted in the class position of the members of the labor movement...

...This working class, both organized and unorganized, has a "common situation and common interests," experienced first and foremost in the reality that it does not have enough money...

...craftsmen and foremen (22 percent...

...It constitutes only the second page of Marx's discussion of classes and it concludes: "Here the manuscript breaks off...

...I believe that the American workers have been a crucial force behind every social gain of the past two generations, and in domestic politics their unions constitute an American kind of de facto social democracy...

...from the nation-states of the Old World where capitalism first emerged...

...he can work at a control panel rather than on an assembly line without changing his subordinate position in the organization of production...

...Paul Sweezy and the late Paul Baran, sympathizers first with Russian, then with Chinese Comnmu328 nism, argued that the organized workers in the United States have been "integrated into the system as consumers and ideologically conditioned members of the society...

...It is precisely the characteristic of an opinion poll that it reaches 'a man or woman as he or she is isolated and poses questions in a kind of political and social vacuum...

...With immigration severely restricted after World War I, the expanding economy of the mid-1920s recruited its new workers from the farm and thus tipped the national demographic balance from rural to urban...

...But the service category also includes the members of the American Federation of Teachers (which, with more than 200,000 dues payers, is becoming an important union within the AFL-CIO) and the staff members of the Museum of Modern Art who, in September 1971, won a strike as members of a union local...

...In August 1971, when Richard Nixon tacitly admitted the bankruptcy of laissez-faire ideas which had created an ingenious recessioninflation, labor reacted in characteristic fashion...

...The total nonagricultural labor force in 1969 numbered 77.902 million men and women...

...HOW IS IT that such a massive social phenomenon and such obvious trends have been ignored, or declared nonexistent, by many observers...

...But, as I document at length in my book Socialism, the tactic of the Inaugural was central to the politics of Marx and Engels from the late '50s to the time of their respective deaths...

...Some of the halcyon notions of the security of these strata were rudely dispelled by the recent Nixon recession, yet no one should have any trouble in distinguishing it from the lot of the wage workers...

...The new strata are not the old middle class, nor the "new middle class" as it was recognized around the turn of the century...

...Therefore—and in this they are typical of most of the people in the new strata—they offer a political base for a narrow, corporaOLD WORKING CLASS, NEW WORKING CLASS 341 fist kind of lobbying, designed to protect particular jobs without reference to social cost or utility...

...Since it involved significant modifications of capitalist society as it had existed until then in the United States, this idea met with violent resistance, both physical and ideolological, from most employers...

...An interest group, as Greenstone points out, has very specific demands and avoids committing itself to a single party or a broad social program out of fear that it will compromise its narrow goals...