Reconsiderations of class: Precariousness as proletarianization

The experience of class conflict, proletarian mobilization, and class consciousness – so clearly visible in 1917-21, 1934-37, and 1946-48 – was very much on the 20th century’s calendar again in the mid-1960s, when the Socialist Register was founded. This ‘moment’ of class struggle, reaching from 1965-74 was, arguably, labour’s last stand in the faltering economic climate of the post-World War II ‘long boom’ that was obviously winding down. For by the mid-1970s, the terms of trade in the class war had shifted. Working-class victories, registering in militant extra-parliamentary mobilizations of class struggle as well as the incremental creep of union densities that saw, over time, the percentage of the non-agricultural workforce associated with labour organizations climb to 35 per cent even in that bastion of ostensible ‘exceptionalism’, the United States, slowed, stalled, and sputtered. The result: declining material standards of the working class as a whole; the domestication of a once combative trade unionism to a machinery of concession bargaining; a generation of young workers robbed of a sense of class place, its future marked by insecurity, with employment prospects understood to be precarious. The developing world and the nature of its class formations reinforces the contemporary significance of proletarian precariousness. What Mike Davis calls the ‘global informal working class’ – a socio-economic stratum that he sees ‘overlapping with but non-identical to the slum population’ – now surpasses one billion in number, ‘making it the fasting growing, and most unprecedented, social class on earth’. But does precariousness, per se, constitute a separate and distinct class formation? If it does, then precarious employments, across a spectrum of almost infinite possibilities, are, in their fragmentations, constitutive of specific and particular classes, which then necessarily occupy different class places, with counterposed class interests, from those in other employment sectors. It is the purpose of this essay to suggest that this kind of thinking, which has of late gathered momentum, is antagonistic to foundational Marxist understandings and will, inevitably, have consequences in terms of struggle and practice which are divisive and counterproductive.