The Middle Class?

During the Forging Communist Unity (FCU) talks, one view expressed was that once workers have taken power, the pathway from declining capitalism to communism would be prolonged due to middle-class groups in occupations at the margins of socialisation who will need to be convinced that communism is worth giving up the apparently privileged status they enjoy in capitalism. It is thought neutralising this middle class, i.e., ‘winning them as allies, slowly, voluntarily drawing them into the socialised economy, through material advantage, through the benefits of cooperatives…’ ^I will be of paramount importance to the successful transition between socialism and communism under the governance of the working class.

Small and Medium Enterprises

The middle class has been equated to ‘some 6.5 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs) employing from zero to 49 workers. If we take Europe, our decisive starting point, the proportionate size of the middle classes is substantially bigger’. Hence ‘those who see only two classes, proletarian and capitalist, who refuse to acknowledge the existence of the middle classes, might as well live on the moon’ ^II.

Equating the middle-class with a stake in the capitalist system, and having possible distinct interests to a working class in power, with 6.5 million SMEs is problematic. Many of the latter are populated by sections of the working class that have experienced the sharp end of capitalist exploitation. If we take the latest data on SMEs, the number of SMEs has increased by one million (23%) since 2010 (UK) to around 5.5 million ^III.

Drilling down we find that most SMEs have their fate dominated by the contracts they receive from global corporations, which effectively utilise them as an out-sourced asset, part of the global supply chain required by the transnational corporate brands that control the global capitalist market. Their employment conditions are more proletarian than middle class! Indeed, if you look at most commodities we consume – from cars to t-shirts – their footprint is global. Global corporate brands employ thousands of small enterprises in a global supply chain to produce and distribute various aspects of the product.  For example, General Motors has 20,000 small enterprises producing parts that go into making GM vehicles ^IV.

Workers employed in the above context are under the tight control of GM (when it comes to efficiency targets and profitability) which takes the view that it is up to the small enterprises how they organise their labour relations to achieve GM targets. An estimated 80% of global trade passes through these small enterprises.

The capitalist class and its powerful friends would like you to believe the ‘400 million SMEs are the backbone of economies around the world. They are the main source of job creation globally, accounting for over 95% of firms and 60%-70% of employment’ ^V. The reality is that transnational capitalism empowered by the imperialist state providing military and economic support dictate the fate of these SMEs, resulting in conditions of work that are highly exploitative, insecure, and create health and safety nightmares due to long hours of poorly paid labour. This is the norm. Supply chain SMEs are far from examples of a burgeoning middle class

SMEs in the yoke of public sector privatisation

The proliferation of small enterprises in the UK during the neo-liberal era of privatisation and deregulation cannot be evidenced as examples of a burgeoning middle class with distinct interests that take time and patience to resolve. The legion of small enterprises that circle the NHS, Education, Housing, Benefits and welfare systems, providing contracted-out services, employ workers intensively on mostly insecure precarious contracts. It would be unbelievable to imagine these workers would not be at the fore of the workers’ revolution, pushing ahead towards a better world through the prism of communes, not harking back to capitalism. The overall picture, in more sanguine language, ‘is dominated by a deterioration of employment terms and conditions for public employees…, either transferred to sub-contractors or functionally seconded to external providers’ ^VI.

Moreover, many small enterprises have subsequently been absorbed by venture capitalists, intent on rationalisations that intensify worker exploitation to drive up profits. We see this happening in the privatised sector of social care that mushroomed in the post-Thatcher era. This is proletarianisation that is calling out for radical transformation, not a burgeoning middle class desperately clinging to material interests in capitalism.

Specialist occupations

It is certainly true that specialist occupations exist that do fit more squarely in sociologically defined middle-class classification systems. However, the two issues here are the level of socialisation characteristic of the production process of the industries concerned, and the differential status of those employed in these industries. Millions of workers are employed in engineering, medicine, technology and science. Each of these sectors have been at the forefront of socialisation, i.e., the collective power of labour is utilised within capital intensive labour processes. They all feed crucial industries to be taken into workers’ ownership and control in relatively quick order: the likes of Airbus, Network Rail, Rolls-Royce, British Airways – the list goes on.

At the top sit a hierarchy that one can classify as Engineer/managers, Scientist/managers and so on. It is they who may be attached to capitalism enough to resist embracing a radical social transformation towards communism, earning vastly different salaries than the rest of us, living in gated communities. Eric Olin Wright would likely classify the latter as holding a ‘contradictory class location’ ^VII: located between worker and capitalist, earning high income – the combination of wages and a portion of surplus value – for services rendered to capitalists, which would align this minority to capitalism.

More to the point, because these sectors are at the fore of a transfer of ownership and control from capitalists to the worker class as a matter of priority, then this group will lose its contradictory class location and would become part of the project of radical social transformation of the sector and society. Indeed, most workers in the above sectors have far fewer ties with their ‘top brass’ and, if the situation of workers in power has any politicising substance to it at all, then capitalism as a way of earning and living will pale in comparison to the alternative before them.

The key point, with respect to the above is that in the here and now these jobs come under threat from continuous profit-driven efficiency drives, rationalisations, and most crucially, for the existence of the occupation itself, the consequences of AI. In which case they would clearly have a lot to gain from the qualitative shift in direction in the socialisation of their respective sectors, implied by the transition towards communism. It will provide all workers with a direct say in how sectors are run and what genuine socially useful purpose they serve. Moreover, their sectors and the relationship between sectors will be qualitatively transformed; work will be more creative, seeking and solving society’s most pressing needs (health, scientific, engineering…) and integrating solutions with society and the natural environment.

Top Brass

Of course, there exists a top brass at the top of other middle-class occupations – Law, Criminal Justice System, Police, Military, Senior Civil Service – who are, collectively, truly part of the capitalist class’s ruling apparatus ^VIII. As Althusser explains, this includes ‘the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc., which constitute what I shall in future call the Repressive State Apparatus. Repressive suggests that the State Apparatus in question ‘functions by violence’ – at least ultimately (since repression, e.g. administrative repression, may take non-physical forms)’.

Does this imply the elongating of the transition to communism? Not necessarily because what applies to abolishing the capitalist class applies to the top brass too. Which is to say, the fate of their positions is no different to that of the capitalist class: the latter class and the top brass that is part and parcel of the ruling class apparatus will be abolished when workers in power are in transition to communism, and their tasks will be democratically assigned to workers based on recall.

In summary

It is also unlikely most occupations that some might regard as middle class discussed here will create any major barrier, rendering the transition to communism a long-term drawn-out affair. And should individuals and small groups wish to pursue their dreams offering services to their communities in corner shops and craft workshops, why not? Most of such services will be socialised and collectivised, but this does not mean workers cannot retain and foster their own creative powers and give shape and meaning to their lives. They are no barrier to the relative speed of communist transformation either. The top-brass establishment occupations are part of the capitalist class apparatus and will be abolished in the same way as the capitalist class rule.

External threats pose a fundamental barrier, not the ‘middle class’. Any coming to power of the working class that is less than international in scope will meet firm and violent resistance from the international capitalist class and its apparatus. The latter is the real barrier, and this barrier comes not in any gradual, drawn out manner decades into a future transition towards communism, but in the initial phase of any workers’ coming to power.  A workers’ revolution is international, or it is not a revolution that can last. The international scope of the revolution and resistance to it is where our attention should be focused.

1. Jack Conrad, ‘Rediscovering our words’, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1533/rediscovering-our-words/[↩]
2. Jack Conrad, ‘Rediscovering our words’, https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1533/rediscovering-our-words/[↩]
3. Govt UK, Business population estimates for the UK and regions 2024: statistical release – GOV.UK[↩]
4. GM ‘General Motors Delves Deep Into Its Value Chain: Q&A with David Tulauskas’, General Motors Delves Deep Into Its Value Chain: Q&A with David Tulauskas – Environment+Energy Leader[↩]
5. Small & medium-sized enterprises – National Action Plans on Business and Human Rights[↩]
6. Refslund, B. (2016) ‘The outsourcing challenge: organizing workers across fragmented production networks’, European planning studies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1034–1036. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2016.1152738[↩]
7. Wright, E.O. (1976) ‘Class Boundaries in Advanced Capitalist Societies’, New Left review, (98).[↩]
8. Louise Althusser () ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm[↩]