Class in Australia
By Craig McGregor
Penguin, 1997. 327 pp., $24.95 (pb)
Review by Jonathan Strauss
"What I did that was new was to demonstrate: 1) that the existence of classes is merely linked to particular historical phases in the development of production, 2) that class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society." — Karl Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852.
The ideas that there are classes, and that these classes are in struggle, are not peculiarly Marxist ideas. And, in a period when trumpets have sounded the end of ideology and history, a writer such as Craig McGregor, who, while no Marxist, is still willing to say all this, and say it with clear sympathy for those oppressed by class, is a refreshing read.
Even on its own ground, McGregor's analysis of class has its weaknesses, however. He patches together features of social life into criteria for class: occupation, power, wealth, education, family, culture, gender, ethnicity and Aboriginality.
In this, he submits to the eclecticism of academic sociology, since he actually structures his discussion of the question around a three-part occupational division — an employing upper class, a generally white-collar middle class and a largely blue-collar working class (with many slippages among these). He also adds a growing underclass to the analysis.
On all the main questions, however, McGregor's passion carries the day. Class is about inequality, he says, and is destructive and "utterly unjustifiable".
He calls for "a radical restructuring of society" — and some of his proposals are very radical: near equalisation of income, abolition of private education, largely abolishing private inheritance of wealth, the power to make decisions in the workplace to rest with those "who carry out most of the work", and an adequate national health system.
But all this would only "make Australia, not a classless society, but a less-class society". McGregor's references to revolution show that he knows how to envisage a classless society, but he does not believe this is possible. So he would have us attempt to get rid of the effects of class without eliminating the cause.
Misunderstanding Marx
McGregor's failure to come to grips with this contradictory stance, which thus presents us with another (non-socialist) utopia, is due to the fact that he does not understand Marx's view of class.
He describes it as "Marx's view" that "class is defined by your relationship to the means of production and class relations are primarily economic relations".
McGregor states what is commonly understood to be Marx's view of class. For example, the review of McGregor's book by Tad Tietze in the Socialist Worker of May 23 echoes McGregor:
"For Marxists, it is the relationship of people to the means of producing wealth in society which is always the key. The central divide in society is between those who own and control the means of making profits (factories, offices, etc) and those who have no such control and must therefore sell their ability to work in order to get enough to eat."
This was not Marx's view of class. For Marx, a class is not a group of people with a particular relationship to the means of production, with society being the population divided into various classes. For him, a class is a group of people with particular relations to other groups of people — social relations of production — and society is structured on these relationships.
Marx wrote: "Capital is a social relation". The capitalists actually own not the means of production but capital, the means with which to buy not only land, raw materials and machines, but labour-power, while the working class is compelled to sell its labour-power because it has already been dispossessed by the capitalists.
To understand this relationship among people as a relationship of people to objects is to take the superficial aspect of reality for its essence, to make a fetish of this "appearance" in the same sense that Marx speaks of "commodity fetishism" ("a definite social relation between human beings ... assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things").
Classes are themselves thrown up from "definite relations of production", for which property relations are "but a legal expression". In fact, in the famous passage of Marx's Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, discussing the motive force and character of social transformations, Marx speaks only of relations of production, and not at all about classes.
McGregor intimates a knowledge of this view of class, admitting Marxism has the "merit of emphasising that those who sell their labour for a living are in fact beholden to a different group that employs them, and therefore have this unifying characteristic in common".
But he does not apply it. Either he evades it (for example, exploitation is mentioned only in passing), or he equivocates, as on the question of whether his upper class, of whom "the key group are the owners", is a ruling class.
The problem with his definition of the ruling class — as Tietze would have it, "defined by its control of productive wealth" — is that it is the definition for any ruling class in history. The different features of ruling classes and of the development of productive forces in the societies under their domination go missing.
In Australia the ruling class is a capitalist class, within which there is competition and, consequently, a drive towards the accumulation and concentration of capital, engendering both an expansion of the capacity to meet human needs and an abject failure to do so. This creates, as part of the worldwide development of capitalism, what Marx saw as the potential material basis for a classless society.
The state
The historical specificity of classes and the possibility of a classless society are not, however, the sole issues dividing Marxists from non-Marxists. There is also the dictatorship of the proletariat, its rise "to the position of the ruling class", but without any interest other than the abolition of all classes.
In achieving this, there are two interrelated problems. Firstly, the working class can't use the existing state — a public power separate from the mass of the population. The workers as the ruling class will be the vast majority of the population, and their state needn't be separate from them. The old state must be replaced by a new one, until the new classless society is created.
Secondly, this revolution is to be made by a class that has power only through its collective action and has as its aim the elimination of all forms of social oppression. It must therefore be the most conscious social action in history to that time, to ensure the unity of the class and to ensure that the breadth of its aims is achieved.
McGregor skirts these problems for the political supremacy of the lower class(es), which would be necessary to carry out even the radical program he proposes in present-day conditions, when the capitalist class, far from conceding progressive reforms, is fighting to drive down the living standards of the working class.
He fails to discuss the character of the state at all. Instead, he assumes, when he talks about state intervention, that this will work against upper class interests.
For the means of achieving his proposals he turns from the "resistance" he finds in subcultures and popular culture to the "radical/reformist tradition" in the social idealism of the broad labour movement and social movements, but also, for political organisation, to the Labor Party — a utopia if ever there was one.
Meanwhile, he never mentions the experiences of the attempts in Australia at working-class revolutionary organisation — the Wobblies, the Communist Party and the organisations which have arisen out of the '60s radicalisation, of which the largest today is the Democratic Socialist Party.
Beyond the workplace
The perspective of Tietze's review is narrower again. He argues that workers, in conflicts resulting from the irreconcilability of the interests of bosses and workers, "can challenge the very basis of the class system where it is rooted, at the point of production ... open[ing] the possibility of the mass of workers confronting the real nature of society and rejecting the ideas they have been fed by the system".
This conflates trade union consciousness with working-class political consciousness and the struggle between workers and their employers with the revolutionary struggle against the whole class system.
The idea that one should join with one's fellow workers against the employers is only a possible first step towards a consciousness that the whole system must change. That consciousness can develop only in the experience of struggle against all oppressions of that system, including the political and ideological domination of the ruling class, and not just those in the workplace.
Elimination of the oppressive relations of class society can't result simply from recognition of class division and conflict. Only in the course of the development of an all-round struggle against those relations can the working class come to question them. The task of a revolutionary party is to aid the development of such a struggle and the development of a revolutionary consciousness and social transformation from it.