The Retreat from Class. Ellen Meiksins Wood
PCF line rejects the ‘dissolution of the wage-earning groupings into the working class’,12 but it denies their class-specificity altogether and allows them to remain in a classless grey area as ‘intermediate strata’. Poulantzas attacks this refusal to identify the class situation of the new wage-earning ‘strata’. It is, he suggests, an abdication to bourgeois stratification theory and is inconsistent with the fundamental Marxist proposition that ‘the division into class forms [is] the frame of reference for every social stratification’. The principle that ‘classes are the basic groups in the “historic process”’is incompatible with ‘the possibility that other groups exist parallel and external to classes …’.13
It should be noted immediately that Poulantzas’s criticism of the PCF line on the ‘new wage-earning groups’ does not strike at its roots either theoretically or practically. In fact, his argument proceeds not as a rejection of PCF principles but, again, as an attempt to supply them with a sounder theoretical foundation, albeit somewhat to the left of the main party line. A truly Marxist theorization of popular alliances must, he argues, be based on a definition of class which grants these ‘strata’ their own class position instead of allowing them to stand outside class. The significant point, however, is that this class position is not to be found within the working class. In other words, Poulantzas is seeking a more clearly Marxist theoretical support for the Eurocommunist conception of an alliance between a narrowly defined working class and non-working-class popular forces.
Why, then, does Poulantzas, in common with the PCF, refuse to accept the theory which ‘dissolves’ these ‘strata’ into the working class? This theory, which he attributes primarily to C. Wright Mills, has been developed more recently in unambiguously Marxist ways by Harry Braverman and others. Poulantzas, however, apparently regards it as a departure from Marxism – for example, on the grounds that it makes the wage the relevant criterion of the working class, thereby making the mode of distribution the central determinant of class.14 (It is perhaps significant that Poulantzas focuses on the wage as a mode of distribution and not as a mode of exploitation – as we shall see in a moment.) He argues further that by assimilating these groups to the working class, this view promotes reformist and social-democratic tendencies. To identify the interests of ‘intermediate strata’ with those of the working class is to distort working-class interests, accommodating them to more backward, less revolutionary elements.15 A political strategy based on the hegemony of the working class and its revolutionary interests, he maintains, demands the exclusion of these backward elements from the ranks of the working class.
On the face of it, then, Poulantzas’s refusal to accept the proletarianization of white-collar workers appears to be directed in favour of a revolutionary stance and the hegemony of the working class which alone is ‘revolutionary to the end’.16 He even criticizes the PCF analysis on the grounds that, despite its refusal to accept this dissolution, it courts the same danger by neglecting to identify the specific class interests of the new wage-earning strata and hence their divergences from working-class interests. It is true that he fails to explain how these dangers will be averted by a ‘working-class’ party whose object is precisely to dilute its working-class character by directly representing other class interests, but let us leave aside this question for the moment. Let us pursue the implications of his own theory of the ‘new petty bourgeoisie’ to see whether it does, in fact, represent an attempt to keep exploitative class relations, class struggle, and the interests of the working class at the centre of Marxist class analysis and socialist practice.
For Poulantzas, the primary structural criterion for distinguishing between the working class and the new petty bourgeoisie at first seems to be the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. The ‘unproductive’ character of white-collar work separates these groups from the ‘productive’ working class. Poulantzas proceeds on the assumption that Marx himself applied this criterion and marked off the ‘essential boundaries’ of the working class by confining it to productive labour. Now it can be shown convincingly that Marx never intended the distinction to be used in this way.17 In any case, Marx never said that he did so intend it, and Poulantzas never demonstrates that this is what he meant. He bases his argument on a misreading of Marx. He quotes Marx as saying ‘Every productive worker is a wage-earner, but it does not follow that every wage-earner is a productive worker.’18 Poulantzas takes this to mean something rather different: ‘as Marx puts it,’ he says, putting words into Marx’s mouth, ‘if every agent belonging to the working class is a wage-earner, this does not necessarily mean that every wage-earner belongs to the working class.’ The two propositions are, of course, not at all the same, nor does Poulantzas argue that the one entails the other. He simply assumes it – i.e. he assumes precisely what needs to be proved, that ‘agent belonging to the working class’ is synonymous with ‘productive worker’. He can then go on to demonstrate that various groups do not belong to the working class simply by demonstrating that they are not, according to Marx’s definition (at least as he interprets that definition), productive workers.
Why this distinction – as important as it may be for other reasons – should be regarded as the basis of a class division is never made clear. It is not clear why this distinction should override the fact that, like the ‘blue-collar’ working class, these groups are completely separated from the means of production; that they are exploited (which he concedes), that they perform surplus labour whose nature is determined by capitalist relations of production – the wage-relationship in which expropriated workers are compelled to sell their labour-power; or even that the same compulsions of capital accumulation that operate in the organization of labour for the working class – its ‘rationalization’, fragmentation, discipline, etc. – operate in these cases too. Indeed, the same conditions – the compulsory sale of labour-power and an organization of work derived from the exploitative logic of capital accumulation – apply even to workers not directly exploited by capital but employed, say, by the state or by ‘nonprofit’ institutions. Whatever the complexities of class in contemporary capitalism – and they are many, as new formations arise and old ones change – it is difficult to see why exploitative social relations of production should now be regarded as secondary in the determination of class. Poulantzas’s use of the distinction between productive and unproductive labour to separate white-collar workers from the working class seems to be largely arbitrary and circular, with no clear implications for our understanding of how classes and class interests are actually constituted in the real world.
In fact, it soon turns out that this ‘specifically economic’ determination is not sufficient – or even necessary – to define the new petty bourgeoisie. It cannot account for all the groups that Poulantzas wants to include in this class. Not only, he suggests, can it not account for certain groups which are involved in the process of material production (e.g. engineers, technicians, and supervisory staff), it cannot explain the overriding unity which binds these heterogeneous elements into a single class set off from the working class. Now, political and ideological factors must be regarded as decisive. These factors are decisive even for those groups who are already marked off by the productive/unproductive labour distinction,19 and in some cases even override that division. In the final analysis, once these groups have been separated out from the bourgeoisie by the fact that they are exploited, the decisive unifying factor that separates them from the working class is ideological, in particular the distinction between mental and manual labour. This distinction cannot be defined in ‘technicist’ or ‘empiricist’ terms, argues Poulantzas – for example, by empirically distinguishing ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ jobs, or those who work with their hands and those who work with their brains, or those who are in direct contact with machines and those who are not. It is essentially a ‘politico-ideological’ division. Although this division cannot be entirely clear-cut and contains complexities which create fractions within the new petty bourgeoisie itself, it is, according to Poulantzas, the one determinant that both distinguishes these groups from the working class and overrides the various differences within the class, including the division between productive and unproductive labour with which it does not coincide. In other words, this ideological division is the decisive factor in constituting the new petty bourgeoisie as a class at all.
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