[The working class should not be positioned as the most vulnerable
in need of help, but as those who labour and deserve a just
distribution of the fruits of their labour. The working class comes
not with a begging bowl, but with a clear strong voice.]
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MARXISM & CLASS  
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Helena Sheehan
September 21, 2023
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_ The working class should not be positioned as the most vulnerable
in need of help, but as those who labour and deserve a just
distribution of the fruits of their labour. The working class comes
not with a begging bowl, but with a clear strong voice. _

Graffiti in Whitehall, London, on December 11, 2010. Source: Paul
Farmer, Wikimedia Commons,

 

_This is the text of a talk at the conference of the Irish Labour
History Society on September 17, 2023._

What does Marxism bring to a conference on visions of labour and
class?

For me, this is connected to what Marxism brings to everything:
context, clarity, coherence, comprehensiveness.

Marxism is an intellectual tradition connected to a political movement
that focuses on totality, on how everything is connected to everything
else. It is a theory of everything, one that is open-ended and always
evolving. There are certain tenets that are basic as well as many
matters where there are serious differences and lively debates.

It is a philosophy of economics, politics, history, culture, even
psychology, that sees all of these spheres as decisively shaped by the
dominant mode of production. It is in particular a critique of the
capitalist mode of production and an orientation toward socialism as
an alternative mode of production.

Class is a key concept for Marxism. The word has many uses as a term
of differentiation and stratification. In social-political-economic
terms, it is a way of categorising social groups in terms of wealth,
status, education, occupation, and culture, often in a very loose and
somewhat shoddy way, when it is addressed at all. For Marxism, it is a
more precise concept and one that is central to its whole analysis of
society.

So what is class for Marxism and how is it different from other
approaches? Basically, Marxism sees class in terms of relationship to
the means of production. In capitalist society, there are two primary
classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—those who own the means
of production and those who depend on wage labour to live. Within
these classes, there are various strata and other differences, but the
great divide is between those who do the work of the world and those
who are able to appropriate the fruits of their work, who can extract
the surplus value of labour without labouring.

I am assuming a broad definition of who is the working class here,
including not only the prototypical proletarian, a male manual
labourer, but all who work by hand or brain, those who make the world
as we know it happen, those who live by their labour, whether plumbers
or pilots or professors, whether they build houses, stack shelves,
perform surgery, or pursue scientific research, of all genders, races,
ethnicities, and nations, the many who are manipulated into serving
the interests of the few.

There is a near absence of discourse about class in contemporary
society. This is because capitalism functions in such a way as to mask
the nature of itself as a system.

There is a liberal discourse about diversity, inclusion, fairness, and
helping those in need that conceals the realities of class. Whenever
issues of social distribution are discussed, there is always lip
service given to protecting those who are most vulnerable, often
reducing the working class to those who need rather than those who do,
those who take rather than those who give.

The trade union movement is nearly alone in addressing the real
relationship between production and distribution, to argue that what
people are demanding is what they have earned through their labour.
Even then, it is most often a matter of making the case in terms of
specific disputes and what is being demanded in terms of wages and
conditions for particular groups of workers. We rarely hear trade
union officials speak about the working class as a class making
demands for radical redistribution in connection with their overall
role in social production.

However, look at the massive response to Mick Lynch when he has been
in the media spotlight and spoken not only about railway workers, but
about the working class, the working class without whom the lights
aren’t turned on, the trains don’t run, the streets aren’t
swept, the sick aren’t nursed, the students aren’t taught. The
clarity and simplicity of that has resonated powerfully.

We have a great tradition of literature and song that expresses this
powerfully.

We were here in Liberty Hall a few months ago celebrating Robert
Tressell’s great novel _The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. _The
title itself stresses what the working class gives rather than what it
takes.

There is Bertholt Brecht’s great poem “Questions from a Worker Who
Reads”:

Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books, you will read the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

And Babylon, many times demolished,
Who raised it up so many times?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
Who erected them?

And there is that great anthem of the labour movement, “Solidarity
Forever”:

It is we who ploughed the prairies, built the cities where they trade,
dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railways laid.
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made…

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
but without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn…

There needs to be a new and constant reassertion of that.

The aim of socialism animating the best of the labour movement is a
form of social organisation shaped by the principle of “from each
according to their abilities / to each according to their needs.”

All that exists and is of value comes from nature or labour, and
mostly from a combination of both. Everyone who exists has the same
number of hours in a day. Why should some people who spend some hours
organising production be able to accrue more in a few seconds than
someone engaging in hard manual labour can earn in a year? Even worse,
why should others who never in their whole lives do any work
whatsoever but inherit shares (or crowns) be able to take enormous
unearned wealth extracted from the labour of others?

How did so much built by so many come to be expropriated by so few? It
has not, on the whole, despite rags-to-riches myths, come from genius
invention or entrepreneurial skill. It has come largely by force,
whether by marauding armies or through oligarchic manipulation of the
state passing and enforcing laws favourable to such expropriation.

This is why the most conscious of the working class have organised for
a system based on social ownership of the means of social production,
allowing for more just distribution and more efficient reinvestment,
not only in the enterprise itself, but in the whole social
infrastructure on which it depends.

This is the only way to harness the resources of society in such a way
as to save our planet from the path of self-destruction on which we
are hurtling along a trajectory that is inherent in the logic of
capitalism.

To me, this is as clear as the rising sun, but the prevailing climate
clouds over it fills the space with clutter and noise and diverts even
progressive impulses into blind alleys.

For example, the cultural turn constitutes a shift in analysis of
social phenomena in terms of culture and away from economics and
science, away from class and mode of production—basically
postmodernism as opposed to Marxism. I do not believe that the
cultural turn was good even for the study of culture, which Marxism
has done even better. I wrote two books about Irish television drama
where my editor insisted that class had nothing to do with it, whereas
I thought otherwise and wrote better books because I did.

Another blind alley is the reduction of everything to identity
politics, without taking class into account. I understand the
contemporary concern with identity. We live lives very different from
our ancestors; we live in more complex times and identities have
become more complex. What begins as a liberating attention to gender,
race, and ethnicity can mutate into a displaced fixation with gender,
race, and ethnicity at the expense of class.

There is also a way of speaking about class without really talking
about class. I hear voices on Raidió Teilifís Éireann talking about
growing up in drug-infested working-class communities, rising above
addiction, turning to education as a lever of social mobility, arguing
that working-class people are as good as anybody, given the right help
from good government policies.

No. The working class is not as good as anybody else. The working
class makes life as we live it possible. The working class makes the
world go round. The working class should not be positioned as the most
vulnerable in need of help, but as those who labour and deserve a just
distribution of the fruits of their labour. The working class comes
not with a begging bowl, but with a clear strong voice and, when
necessary, a clenched fist.

This is why we need to engage in a discourse that provokes the working
class to see themselves more clearly as the working class and to
embark on a road that will lead from capitalism to socialism.

_Helena Sheehan is Professor Emerita at Dublin City University in
Ireland where she taught STS as well as history of ideas more
generally. Her books include Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A
Critical History, The Syriza Wave, Navigating the
Zeitgeist and Until We Fall (in progress). She has also published
many articles on philosophy, science, politics, and culture. She has
lectured in various countries in America, Europe and Africa. She has
been an activist on the left since the 1960s._

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