Editor's note: José A. Soler is a contributing editor of Political Affairs. He directs the Arnold M. Dubin Labor Education Center at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, which provides resources to working people in Massachusetts for higher education, union leadership training, as well as workforce development.
PA: In the Democratic primaries we saw a lot of discussion about class, especially the middle class and the working class, and we hear the media, the labor movement, and politicians talking about the working class and the middle class. Is there is such a thing as a middle class as opposed to the working class? Could you help us to clarify these confusing and apparently contradictory terms?
José Soler: In the first place, I subscribe to the Marxist conception of class, which is that your class position is determined by your relation to the means of production, whether you own them or not. There are different views about class. Lenin held a view similar to Marx, but he added to it the question of who is a proletariat, and goes on to define the proletariat in terms of the production of surplus value.
The concept of “middle class” is a tough one, because it is mainly an income-generated thing. Michael Zweig, for instance, in his book The Working Class Majority, defines class in terms of political power. I think that is there is a lot of confusion about class in the United States. One of the things that happened during the Cold War was that the concept of class was basically knocked out of discussions in academia and most other places. The concept of the “American dream” and upward mobility became the main focus – the idea that in this system everybody has the potential to be a Rockefeller, a Vanderbilt, or a J.P. Morgan. So the concept of class was lost.
Today, the labor movement, which is at the crux of this whole semantic confusion, repeatedly uses the term middle class, and uses it, I think, more or less as if it meant working class. But it really doesn’t mean the same thing. There is a lot of confusion about these terms. I think that part of the problem with the labor movement is that it does not really have a working class program – even in the most rudimentary form. They don’t have what is called a “class-for-itself program,” one that is for the working class. The US labor movement is not like COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions) in South Africa or the CGT (General Confederation of Labor) in France, or other labor movements around the world that are more based on a class conception of society, on working-class politics, and who have a the vision that it is working people who ultimately should be the ones who run society.
PA: You spoke about “the production of surplus value” by workers. What do you mean by that, and how does that determine who the working class is?
Soler: Lenin used to say that the proletariat were those who were directly involved in generating surplus value. The simplest way to define what is meant by surplus value is this: Workers work an eight-hour day and produce their salary, which is what they earn in maybe three or four hours out of the day. The rest of the work they do during the remaining four or five hours, and the benefits of that work, all goes to the employer. That, basically, is surplus value.
That basically is what Lenin said. Today, there are also many non-proletarian jobs that are aimed at reproducing capitalist society, jobs such as teachers, professors, etc. And there is currently a lot of debate about how those kinds of jobs fit into the picture. But that is what Lenin basically had to say about surplus value.
PA: The other concept you raised is “class-for-itself” consciousness.
Soler: By that I mean the ultimate in class consciousness. A class that is “for itself” is a class that basically understands, not just that it is a class with common interests and common goals, but that it has a basic political agenda. It is a class with its own social agenda, and in this way it becomes not only part of the trade union movement, which has more or less a trade union consciousness – which is what the US labor movement has primarily has more than anything else to a certain degree.
When the working class develops this kind of class-for-itself consciousness, it starts working for the makeover of society by winning political power as a class. In all capitalist societies the working class is the majority, but with a class-for-itself consciousness, the working class understands what its role is politically and has a political program that is class-based. With that kind of class consciousness, the working class forms its own party, in many cases a Communist Party.
PA: A lot of the definitions and concepts we are talking about here were constructed in the 19th and early 20th century. But in the 21st century, capitalism has now become a totally globalized system, and there are a lot of trends that insist that this process of globalization has changed the nature of class. Has it?
Soler: I think that capitalism fundamentally has not changed. Capitalism is based on exploitation and profit, because the only way you can make a profit is by exploitation. It is true that capitalism has changed in some ways. For instance, it is no longer clear who owns a particular factory or industry. Today you have far-flung boards of directors and you have echelons of executives, headed by the CEO. But even these highly paid executives aren't the leading forces of the ruling class, or even its leading members. Basically they work for the ruling class. I don’t think, however, that the basic concept of capitalism has changed at all – it is still profits at all costs. It’s the reverse of that well-known Communist Party slogan – people before profits. Capitalists firmly believe in profits before people.
What I don't think you have today is the clearcut vision that you had in the 19th century or for much of the 20th century. Then you were fighting against an owner of a factory or a shop. Now, you don’t know who the owners are in most cases, or what in what corner of the world they are located.
But what has not changed is the class structure of society. The global nature of capitalism means that more and more countries have now been incorporated into that class structure, which means, in turn, that there are more and more working people throughout the world who are earning less and less as wages are driven down, workers who are being uprooted and forced to migrate to search for work to support themselves and their families; workers who insure a steady supply of low-cost workers for the capitalist system.
So what does it mean when we talk about 21st century socialism? In the long run, there is no other solution for working people. But we definitely need to learn from the mistakes of the past. One thing is certain, capitalism is not going to solve anything. With capitalism, I do not think you have the possibility of solving society's problems.
But that is another debate. There are a lot of debates, and a lot of criticisms leveled at the failures of past socialist societies. For instance, the centralized control of the state was never supplanted by democratic people’s organizations. Because of that, some socialist societies developed into rigidly bureaucratic, one-party states.
However, capitalism has not changed. That is my main point here. Capitalism is still based on exploitation, and that is why you still have a class struggle going on.
PA: One of the topics that you have written on for Political Affairs is the immigrant rights struggle. Globalization has certainly caused increased immigration, as you say. These days there is a lot of new thinking about how race, ethnicity, culture, religion, nationality, and legal status impact the way class works. How do we work across these categories to get back to the basic working class concept you talk about?
Soler: One of the things we need to remember is that the issue of immigration, wherever you go, is always an issue of super-exploitation, and especially in the United States. But it is also an issue that involves the international working class per se. It all boils down to being an issue of workers rights.
There are real difficulties within the US labor movement in regard to immigration. for instance, in the part of the country where I live and work, in SE Massachussetts, we had a massive raid by federal agents at the Michael Bianco Inc. factory in New Bedford where 360 workers were rounded up in March of this year. Although Gov. Deval Patrick called the aftermath of the raid a 'humanitarian crisis,' the labor movement in Massachusetts failed to take any kind of action to protest what happened to those workers at Bianco, where immigrant workers who were being incredibly exploited by their boss. You are talking about a basic question of worker rights. You are talking here about the human rights of working people.
If you don’t protect the rights of every worker, documented or undocumented, Black and white, then you are going to promote inequalities in the workforce that divide workers, and create enemies within the workforce among the workers themselves. What does that do? It takes the heat off the owners, the bosses, the ruling class in society. That is what sowing division among workers is all about.
You mentioned race and ethnicity, and this is similar to the argument about “white privilege” which has resurfaced and is a big subject of discussion in certain circles. Yes, there is institutionalized racism in this country. But if you start blaming white workers for the situation of Black workers – not to say that some aren’t guilty of racism – then you lose sight who it is that is promoting racism – the ruling class – and what forces are making sure that racism divides the working class, so that the working class cannot fulfill its role in history. This policy of divide and conquer has been accomplished perfectly in capitalist societies, and especially in the United States.
When I worked for Clergy and Laity Concerned in the 1980s, one of the things we started looking at was the campaign against apartheid in South Africa. We were trying to figure out how the heck do we deal with apartheid in South Africa, but at the same time deal with the whole issue of racism here in the US. We basically started looking at enclaves like Harlem in New York, and places in New Jersey like Camden, where there was outright separation of where people of color lived, and where other folks, white folks, lived. We started realizing that we had to deal with apartheid in South Africa and apartheid at home, and we then structured a campaign around that.
In essence, racism divides the working class and keeps the working class suppressed. I think that we, as a Party, and the Left in general, need to come back to this issue. We need to make racism one of our key fighting points. The essential point we need to make is that the elimination of racism is the best thing that could happen for the working class. It is just like colonialism in Puerto Rico, the independence of Puerto Rico is a key issue in terms of giving more power to the working class, because it weakens the ruling class, in a colony of that importance.
I think that we have to approach racism and the central issues facing the working class, everything, from a specifically working-class point of view.
PA: Just to follow up on what you have just said, this is both a workplace question – for example, how workers in a particular work place or a particular industry view other workers – but it also extends to the community, to where we live.
Soler: That’s correct. Because if you look at it from this perspective, it begins to challenge us and promotes the notion of solidarity among workers of different races from different place. If you start to understand that these folks are workers, just like you are, you begin to think about why they are coming here to work in the first place. What is it that is causing them to leave their country to come here? Because few people want to leave their own country really. They come for different reasons, but the number one reason they come is because of the state of the world economy, that “free-market” economy we call globalization and the rest of the world calls neoliberalism or the Washington Consensus.
The issue is that neoliberalism is destroying people’s livelihoods; it is destroying their jobs and sources of income in their home countries. Most immigrants to the US come from rural areas, where the family farms that have supported people for generations are being destroyed by corporate agriculture and the influx of cheaper US commodities. Poor countries still must deal with the vestiges of colonialism, false lines of frontiers and the destruction of old, established tribal routines.
But once you understand the concept of the working class, that we have a working class that is not just a national working class, but is also a huge international working class, you begin to see things differently. In his article, “Can the Working Class Change the World,” (Monthly Review, March 2004), Michael Yates writes about how nationalism and imperialism distort how the working class looks at itself, especially nationalism. Now, I am by no means advocating the eradication of national borders, but what I am advocating is that you have to look at capitalism as a global system. Even so-called socialist societies like China, and societies that are trying to build socialism like Cuba and others, exist in a world that is basically dominated by the capitalist mode of production. So it is currently very difficult both to achieve socialism and survive in a capitalist-imperialist world.
PA: One of the things that global capitalism has really driven home is that since class and capitalism continue to exist, working people all over the world need to develop a world-view that includes the idea of an international working class. This is something a lot of people in the labor movement are beginning to talk about.
Soler: It certainly is. For example, we now have this merger between the USW (United Steelworkers) in the US and the 2-million-strong British union Unite. That is the key element – joining forces internationally. I also think that we are beginning to see a real rebound in the labor movement around the globe. It’s happening everywhere slowly but surely. In Ecuador this past May, there was a meeting of trade unions from all over Latin America, and also several from the United States, called “Our America.” It was basically billed as a class-based trade union movement conference. Most of those who attended were left-based unions from Latin America. This is an important development, because the trade union movement in Latin America after decades of neoliberalism had basically been destroyed, and it looked like it was not in any shape to mount any kind of fight.
But the unions in Latin America have rebounded and now play an important role in the fight for change, along with all the other broad-based social movements. Latin America is a very interesting place to watch right now. The latest example is Fernando Lugo, the newly-elected president of Paraguay, who is a liberation theologian and ex-Catholic Bishop. As an example of the kind of change he represents, Lugo has said he is not going to accept any money for being president. He’s giving back the money – he doesn’t need it, he says. He has also named Margarita Mbywangi as his Minister for Indigenous Affairs, a 46-year-old tribal chief who was captured in the jungle as a girl and sold into forced servitude several times to work for the families of large landowners. There is an incredible dynamic going on there.
