Defining Class Interests and Class Positions

Immediate and Fundamental Class Interests

To make the claim that socialism is in the "interests" of the working class is not simply to make an ahistorical, moralistic claim that workers ought to be in favour of socialism, nor to make a nor­mative claim that they would be "better off" in a socialist society, but rather to claim that if workers had a scientific understanding of the contradictions of capitalism, they would in fact engage in struggles for socialism. In these terms, the very definition of class is systematically linked to the concept of class struggle: to define a position as located within the working class is to say that such a position can potentially sustain socialist objectives in class struggles.

Within this general conception of class interests it is possible to distinguish between what can be termed immediate and fundamental interests. Immediate class interests constitute interests within a given structure of social relations; fun­damental interests centre on interests which call into question the structure of social relations itself. That is, immediate interests are interests defined within a given mode of production (i.e. interests which take the mode of production as a given), while fundamental interests are defined between modes of production (i.e., they call into question the mode of production itself). The immediate economic interests of the working class, for example, are defined largely by market relations. Struggles for wages, better living conditions, better education opportunities and so forth all constitute struggles for objectives defined within the basic structure of capitalism. Struggles for socialism, on the other hand, challenge the premises of capital­ist relations and reflect the fundamental interests of the working class.

Immediate interests are not "false" interests; they are "incomplete" interests. The struggle over wages reflects a cor­rect understanding by workers of their immediate conditions of existence within capitalism; the restriction of struggles to ques­tions of wages, however, reflects an incomplete understanding of the nature of capitalist society as a whole, for it fails to grasp the possibility of transcending the entire system of capitalist exploitation through socialism.

Immediate and fundamental interests do not exist apart from each other; they are dialectically linked. On the one hand, because immediate interests are real, because they impinge directly on the day-to-day existence of workers in capitalist society, it is utopian to conceive of class struggle organized around fundamental interests which does not as well deal with immediate interests. On the other hand, the working class is much more divided at the level of immediate interests than at the level of fundamental interests. Skilled workers are gen­erally in much more favourable market conditions than unskilled workers and thus often have different immediate interests from other workers. Because of labour market segmentation, male workers may have different immediate interests from female workers, black workers from white workers. Because immediate interests divide the working class, and because they do not directly call into question the structure of capitalist relations, the durability of capitalism depends, in part, on the extent to which struggles over fundamental interests are displaced into struggles over immediate interests.

This contradiction between the immediate and fundamental interests of the working class pervades debates on the left: socialist struggles must take seriously immediate interests, and yet struggles over immediate interests tend to undermine socialist struggles. This contradiction cannot be wished away; it is inherent in the class relations of capitalist society itself. Only in a revolutionary situation do the struggles over immediate and fundamental interests begin fully to coincide (indeed, this might be part of the definition of a revolutionary situation: a situation in which the struggle for objectives within the dominant mode of production directly reinforces struggles over the mode of production).

The Class Location of Positions not Directly Determined by Production Relations

With this understanding of the distinction between immediate and fundamental interests, we can now approach the problem of the class location of various positions in the social structure which are not directly determined by production relations. As a general proposition, the class location of such positions is determined by their relationship to the fundamental interests of classes defined within the social relations of production. Let us see what this means for a number of specific categories of positions defined outside of production relations.

1. Housewives. A variety of strategies have been adopted to deal with the class location of housewives. In some accounts, domestic production is treated as a subsidiary mode of production in its own right, in which the male occupies the position of exploiter and the female, the position of exploited. In other accounts, household production is treated as the final state of capitalist production itself, and the housewife as an unpaid worker who is indirectly subordinated to capital. A much more straightforward way of dealing with this question is to examine the fundamental interests of housewife positions. In particular, in what sense do the fundamental class interests of the housewife of a worker differ from those of the worker himself? One might want to claim that she has different interests as a woman, but do her class interests differ in any meaningful way? Does she have any less of a fundamental interest in socialism? Unless one is willing to argue that working class housewives have different interests with respect to socialism, then it is clear that they fall within the working class. This does not in any way imply that the sexual division of labour is unimportant, that women are not oppressed within that divi­sion of labour, but simply that the sexual division of labour does not create a division of fundamental class interests between husbands and their housewives.

2. The unemployed; welfare recipients. Temporarily unemployed people-the reserve army of the unemployed-pose no special problem for a class analysis. Like students and pensioners, they are tied to trajectories of class positions, and this defines their basic class location. The category of permanently unemployed, on the other hand, is more problematic. In classical Marxism, such positions were generally identified as "lumpenproletariat", the underclass of society. This is not an entirely satisfactory way of classifying such positions, for it suggests that they have fundamentally opposed interests to the working class, and thus would play at best an ambivalent role in socialist struggles. At the level of immediate interests, to be sure, there is certainly a tremendous gulf between the working class and the permanently unemployed, at least in the United States, since welfare payments come directly out of taxes and workers see those taxes as coming out of their own labour. At the level of fundamental interests, the question becomes much more ambiguous. If we adopted a purely normative stance towards interests, then it would be easy to say that the permanently unemployed would undoubtedly "benefit" from socialism. But the same could be said of feudal peasants, slaves, and even many small shopkeepers; yet such positions would not thereby fall into the working class." The question is not whether on the basis of ahistorical, utilitarian criteria an individual who is permanently unemployed would benefit from socialism, but whether socialism is a potential objective of struggle for such positions. That is, are those positions linked to capitalist rela­tions of production in such a way that they potentially produce socialist working class consciousness? I cannot adequately answer this question. While it is certainly the case that the conditions of the permanently unemployed can engender an anti-capitalist consciousness, it is less clear whether they would systematically generate or sustain a socialist consciousness. As a purely provisional solution to this problem, the permanently unemployed can be considered a marginalized segment of the working class.

3. Employees in political and ideological apparatuses. The final category of positions not directly defined by production relations are positions located entirely within what has traditionally been called the "superstructure": policemen, preachers, professors, etc. How can we understand the fundamental class interests of such positions? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to expand our discussion of class interests from purely economic class interests (socialist vs. capitalist organization of production) to political and ideological class interests (socialist vs. capitalist organization of the state and ideology). Once this is done, we can analyse the relationship between different locations within the political and ideological apparatuses to these interests.

The fundamental interest of the capitalist class at the political and ideological level is to prevent the working class from acquiring state power and ideological hegemony. In different periods of capitalist development this implies different concrete class objectives, but throughout the history of capitalism it has implied the maintenance of hierarchical and bureaucratic structures within the political and ideological apparatuses. Such bureaucratic structures are essential in protecting the capitalist state from potential working class domination.

The fundamental interests of the working class at the political and ideological level are, in a dialectical manner, to obtain state power and establish ideological hegemony. This implies a qualitative restructuring of the capitalist state - what is polemically referred to as "smashing" the state - in ways which allow the working class as a class to exercise state power. While the precise contours of such a reorganization are impossible to specify in advance, the minimum requirement is that they be radically democratic and antibureaucratic.

Different positions within the bureaucratic structures of the political and ideological apparatuses of capitalist society clearly have different relationships to these fundamental bourgeois and proletarian class interests, Schematically, positions within the political and ideological apparatuses can be grouped into three functional categories in terms of these antagonistic class interests:

1. bourgeois positions involving control over the creation of state policies in the political apparatuses and the production of ideo­ logy in the ideological apparatuses. Examples would include the top bureaucratic positions in the state, churches, universities, and other such institutions.

2. contradictory locations involving the execution of state policies and the dissemination of ideology. Examples would include a beat policeman and a high school teacher.

3. proletarian positions involving complete exclusion from either the creation or execution of state policies and ideology. Examples would include a clerk or janitor in a police station and a typist in a school.

In the analysis of positions within the ideological apparatuses, the central issue is the social relations of control over the apparatuses of ideological production per se, not simply the participation in the production of ideology. A news reporter, for example, is to a greater or lesser extent involved in producing ideology, but is generally completely excluded from the control over the news apparatus as a whole, and would thus not occupy the bourgeois position within the news media. In these terms, it would be possible further to elaborate this schema of class locations within the ideological apparatuses by introducing the notion of petty bourgeois positions (self-employed, independent intellectuals who control their process of ideological production) and "semi-autonomous" positions (positions which have some control over their immediate production of ideology, but do not control the apparatus of ideological production at all). A novel­ist might fall into the former category, an assistant professor into the latter.

— An edited excerpt from Class, Crisis and the State by Erik Olin Wright.

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Class, Crisis and the State

by Erik Olin Wright

The idea of “class interest”—the set of social objectives of a given class—has been well explored in socialist thought. But what about the ability to realize these objectives? The complex tension b...

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