General Introduction

Stanley Aronowitz and Michael J. Roberts

This volume of documents, classic articles and original analysis by the editors remains controversial on several grounds. Despite the growing evidence that the global economy is dominated by a handful of leading corporations and the very rich individuals who control them, the conventional wisdom is that we live in a world of mom and pop enterprises. Accordingly, most citizens of the most industrially developed countries are termed "middle class." For those who do not own their own businesses, we measure class by income and by consumption. Beneath this vast social group is the relatively small corps of the poor, a diminishing proportion of the population.

Mainstream political science insists that there is no ruling class or power elite in the functions of the state. Following the dictum, most forcefully established in the late 1950s by Yale political scientist Robert Dahl, whose book Who Governs? remains a bible for many, American politics consists of a plurality of organizations, including business, political parties, pressure groups on single issues, and unions, none of which, in advance, constitutes the leading edge of governance. This idea of American classlessness can be traced back to the immensely influential book Why There is No Socialism in the United States (1906) by the German economist and sociologist Werner Sombart. Sombart advanced the thesis that the workers were not a class in the European sense. They did not exhibit solidarity as a class because America is really the land of opportunity. It had no feudal tradition and possessed unlimited natural and economic resources. The urban political machines address and often solve the most pressing issues facing workers outside the workplace. Yet in subsequent years, especially the 1930s, 1940s and 1960s, American workers engaged in some of the sharpest strikes, factory occupations and demonstrations of any working class in advanced industrial capitalism, most of which were unauthorized by law.1 Even so, conventional social science remains adamant that class plays a subordinate or no role in the conduct of politics and the political economy. According to this view, the United States is a middle class society with a tiny stratum of the rich and a slightly larger underclass of the poor, who are declining over time. And the poor are poor because their families are dysfunctional or they lack the energy and the will to take advantage of prevailing opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty. Some anthropologists and sociologists advanced the theory that the poor wallow in a "culture of poverty" that effectively cuts them off from mainstream society. In the absence of outside intervention, either by the state or by private philanthropies this culture, it is held, is self-reproducing. Among the leading scholars of this position were Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, whose book Beyond the Melting Pot stirred fierce debate in the 1960s when the question of poverty commanded the nation's attention and became a subject of national policy.

However, the most disputed idea that underlies this project is that we declare that our societies are constituted by three classes: a capitalist ruling class consisting of the tycoons of finance, the top political managers, the corporate elite, and in the United States what C. Wright Mills termed the "warlords" at the pinnacle of the military; a middle class of small business owners and salaried professionals and technical operatives who still enjoy some autonomy in the performance of their work; and the working class, employed or not, with decent or low income, who have little or no control over their labor.2 More, we argue that class and class conflict has riven society throughout the history of capitalism and, indeed, constitutes how capitalism has developed. Capital accumulation is not an automatic process initiated solely by investment. It is spurred by economic and social struggles. When force does not work, the demands of labor are often met by capitalists through the introduction of job-destroying technologies that may yield higher wages, but to fewer employees. Capitalism has penetrated agriculture in these societies, so that there is no longer a peasantry. Capitalist agriculture is almost entirely industrialized; it imposes a factory-like division of labor, hours of work and forms of supervision. Most people who work the land are either a diminishing group of small producers, seasonal laborers on middle sized farms, many of whom are immigrants, often undocumented, or workers for giant agricultural corporations. The developing world, which still has billions of peasants - small owners, tenant farmers, subsistence farmers, workers on state or privately-owned industrial farms - has experienced, over the last 40 years, an explosion in manufacturing industry. The primary site for the industrialization is China. Following the death in 1977 of Mao, the revolution's key figure, the leadership of the Communist Party began a major program of industrialization. In predominantly peasant society, its first task was to create a working class. With a population of over a billion, it adopted the most extensive enclosure in human history. The expulsion of farm labor from the countryside made the parallel effort of the British seventeenth and eighteenth centuries look like a tea party. In the 1980s and 1990s, 150 million people were driven from the land into China's major cities.3 There they were employed in construction, factories and urban service industries, and some remained unemployed pending economic expansion. Second, under state control, the government invited foreign private capital to establish industrial plants and other enterprises. Third, the state began a program of expanded vocational and higher education to train skilled workers, scientific and technical personnel and managers. In contrast to the years following the conquest of power in 1949, the party and the government were eager to learn from the capitalist West, and to import its technologies. For example, scientists, engineers and students were sent abroad to acquire knowledge and training in their respective fields and western consultants were brought to China to train the indigenous population in management skills and technical fields.

By 2000 China was already a major global industrial power. It quickly overtook western countries in the production of textiles, shoes and clothing, but moved beyond light manufacturing to heavy machinery such as construction vehicles, electronics (computers, telephones and other equipment), petrochemicals and, within a few years, automobiles. Much of its industrial production was destined for export; its main internal market was among the growing middle class of small producers and professionals. The regime retained a substantial state sector, but the emphasis on attracting private capital marked a new phase in the country's history. China's exports to the United States and Europe far exceeded its imports. By 2010, China was supplying inexpensive cars to the growing middle class of Southeast Asia and was beginning to penetrate the African and Latin American markets.

Working and living conditions in the private sector were, in the main, abysmal. The 1990s witnessed the beginning of a steady wave of worker protest against these conditions. Workers demanded higher wages, but also fought for decent working conditions and housing. The state permitted strikes and demonstrations against private sector employers, but strictly forbid industrial action against state enterprises. Its argument was that because the Chinese state is a workers' state, workers cannot strike against themselves. Yet the past 20 years have been rife with class conflict. Since the early 1990s, official reports count the number of protests each year at about 7000; in recent years the number has reached nearly twice that amount.4 In some instances the government and the private employers have responded by instituting reforms. In other cases, conditions have not materially improved. Workers are often required to labor for 12-16 hours a day and occasionally are forced to spend 30 hours or more on the job. Beyond the factory the government's vast urban development program has been met with resistance. As the government tore down thousands of residential buildings to make way for industrial plants and middle class housing, residents responded by what the official press termed "riots," which obliged the authorities to promise relocation to alternative housing, a promise not always fulfilled. Will the great proletarian revolution break out in China?

Following World War Two, experts left, right and center have, with numbing regularity, declared the era of class and class struggle at an end. In the advanced societies, workers enjoyed rising living standards brought about by a combination of economic growth in Western Europe and North America and the legalization of collective bargaining and state-sponsored social benefits. The strike weapon proved potent, providing upward pressure for change. While Europeans hesitate to call this phenomenon a symptom of the "bourgeoisification" of the working class, sociologists in the United Kingdom and the United States argued that workers had become "middle class" and the concept of struggle between classes was permanently overcome by welfare capitalism.5 State and private pensions insured the continuation of economic security beyond employment; unemployment compensation effectively tided over those temporarily afflicted by...