Farewell to the working class?

By the early 1980s, the class-centered politics of the socialist tradition was in crisis. In this situation, leading commentators took apocalyptic ton es. By the end of the 1980s, the Left remained deeply divided between the a dvocates of change ("New Times" required new politics) and the defenders of the faith (class politics could be practiced, mutatis mutandis, much as be fore). By the mid-1990s the former had mainly carried the day. We wish to p resent this contemporary transformation not as the "death of class," but as the passing of one particular type of class society, one marked by the pro cess of working-class formation between the 1880s and 1940s and the resulti ng political alignment, reaching its apogee in the social democratic constr uction of the postwar settlement. As long-term changes in the economy combi ned with the attack on Keynesianism in the politics of recession from the m id-1970s, the unity of the working class ceased to be available in the old and well-tried way, as the natural ground of left-wing politics. While one dominant working-class collectivity went into decline (the classic male pro letarians of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry, with their associated forms of trade unionism and residential concentration), another slowly and unevenly materialized to take its place (predominantly female w hite-collar workers in services and all types of public employment). But th e operative unity of this new working-class aggregation-its active agency a s an organized political presence- is still very much in formation. To recl aim the political efficacy of the socialist tradition, some new vision of c ollective political agency will be needed, one imaginatively keyed to the e merging conditions of capitalist production and accumulation at the start o f the twenty-first century. Class needs to be reshaped, reassembled, put ba ck together again in political ways. To use a Gramscian adage: The old has been dying, but the new has yet to be born. Class decomposition is yet to b e replaced by its opposite, the recomposition of class into a new and coher ently shaped form.