[This is the second of three posts on the Great British Class Survey. To access the others, go to the introduction here.]

If an analysis of exploitation is reintroduced to the picture, we are left with something more what Erik Olin Wright finds in his book Classes (the full text can be read here). Wright suggests that there is a ‘clear majority’ of working-class people in the subjects of his study (Sweden and the US). By ‘working class’ he means people whose essential relation to capital is that they are exploited by a sizeable elite (constituting around a quarter of society). This ‘exploitation’ isn’t what perhaps the most obvious meaning might take it to be, but a simple Marxist calculation, which I’ll quickly explain.

In chapter 9 of Capital, vol. 1, Marx writes an acute, and incidentally very funny, rebuttal of a classical explanation of how much work the worker does to provide profit for a mill owner. The economist Nassau W. Senior suggested that if an owner spends £80K on a mill and machinery and £20K on raw materials and wages, of which £15K are wages (so, that’s a a total investment of £100K) and sells the results for £115K, then it seems that the worker is only devoting one hour (that is, two 23rds or ten 115ths) of their 11.5 hours of daily work to the production of profit for the owner. In other words, 10.5 hours are spent generating money to pay for the £100K of the owner’s costs, and one further hour is spent producing the £15K of profit. That seems OK, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately it’s a wonky calculation. On this basis, if the worker does only 4 hours of work, then rather than producing something that can be sold for something, the mill owner would actually lose money: the worker wouldn’t even have reproduced the cost of the raw materials yet. Clearly that’s false: the worker will have produced less, but will still have produced something, and that something can be sold. So the only logical conclusion is that the worker is generating profit with every minute of work. Raw materials are converted into commodities every minute, and in every minute the cost of labour and raw materials that is outlayed by the owner is converted into something that can be sold for a profit. The rate of the profit increases the more hours the worker does. So the calculation of exploitation is extremely simple: you just have to work out the ratio of profit to the labour costs. Since in Senior’s example the labour costs £15K and the profits are £15K, the rate of exploitation is 100%. The workers work 5.75 hours in the day to produce their own wages and 5.75 hours in the day to produce the owner’s profit. That is exploitation. The rate of it is varied by workplace disputes and the drive to work shorter hours for more pay, but even if the rate of exploitation is 1%, that is value that is being taken away from the worker by the owner, who is ultimately, no matter how hard the worker pushes, the one who retains control of what are classically called ‘the means of production’.

Class has to be understood in terms of exploitation for the simple reason that, as I have already observed, what matters is material reality, the individual’s ability to sustain a comfortable, healthy, even pleasurable existence. Having cultural or social pleasures does mitigate other sufferings – this is why community and shared cultural interests like football are often so strong among the economically abject – but rather than aiding in the struggle to reduce exploitation and increase fairness, it actually aids in exploitation by making the system seem bearable. The more that capitalism grows, the more scraps the master can throw from his table. But if we focus, as the Great British Class Survey encourages us to do, on the differentiation between the dogs by the table, we sideline the question of actually doing something to change this relation between the classes. Instead of focusing attention on modern forms of exploitation, studies like this, which stress social and cultural capital, end up giving too much weight to a person’s character and interests than their position in society. The implication of it is in fact pretty insulting. ‘Yes, you live in a tiny flat with rising damp and a knackered boiler and have soles flapping off your shoes. But you count solicitors and professors among your friends and you listen to the Afternoon Play on Radio 4 so you’re much posher than someone like me, rattling lonesomely around my 5-bedroomed Mayfair townhouse, with Jessie J piped through the integrated hi-fi in every room my only companion. How I envy you the glorious richness of your social and cultural life!’

Far from shrinking as a proportion of society, it’s clear that the percentage of the working class, or the proletariat, is actually growing. The old forms of exploitation still exist, but new forms are being developed as the privatization of shared social space continues at full tilt. Consider just hospitals and universities. The professional classes of surgeons and academics who service these industries increasingly find themselves subject to new forms of economic exploitation. Here it is not the case, as it was with the historic shift from artisanal to industrial production, that the surgeons and academics were producing things like tables and trousers that once generated profits entirely for them and subsequently generated profits for the capitalist. No, today’s surgeons and academics increasingly find that the things they do in their jobs – the routine surgery, the academic ‘impacts’ (see here for my analysis of this) – are siphoned off as items of sale for private business. The relation even of the ‘established middle classes’ in the Great British Class Survey paradigm to capital is, therefore, increasingly one of exploitation. I don’t mean that we should weep, particularly, for people earning £40K or more, but I do think that it is foolish to be blind to the way that the proletarianization of the population is growing, not shrinking, and I also think that we should be alert to the dangers of swallowing the quietistic assurances of studies like this.

[Next: Demonization of anti-capitalist cultural forms]

[This is the first of three posts on the Great British Class Survey. To access the others, go to the introduction here.]

The question of class is bound up with the security of one’s position in society. If you earn a good wage and can afford to buy your own home, so that you are not at risk of being chucked out onto the street by a landlord who wants to lift the rent to a level above that you can afford, you are more secure than someone who can only afford to rent. And if you can afford two houses, three foreign holidays a year, and have plentiful savings, you are of course even more secure. There’s a continuum from relatively low to relatively high, though those in direst need and those with the most exceptional wealth lie beyond that continuum and are essentially connected to it or to each other only in the forms of torturer or torture victim. It doesn’t make you any more able to feed or clothe yourself if you can happily read Latin, and it doesn’t make you any more a kid from the ghetto if you listen to hip hop in your own private wing of Castle Howard. Money, its rate of generation, and its expression in the form of assets, is the crucial factor in determining one’s status in society. Of course if you’re rich and you have the same interests as an even richer and more powerful person, you might be able to wangle a bit more riches for yourself with their help; but aristocrats aren’t going to become buddies with the poor of the estates just because they both like reading The Master and Margarita. (But of course, neither are aristocrats going to become friendly with lottery winners whose interests and opinions are otherwise remote from their own.) The three ‘capitals’ interact in complex ways, and in essence there is a lot of sense in attempting to unravel things in the way that Savage et al. have done, but I think we should be clear about the picture of society this research reflects (though it does not, I suggest, generate it on its own).

We are blithely assured, in the journal article summarizing the research, that the working class ‘now only comprise 14 per cent of the population, and are relatively old, with an average age of 65. To this extent, the traditional working class is fading from contemporary importance, and clearly is less prominent than the established middle class’ (27). The implication is that once those stragglers from history have died, there will be no more working class. So we should just sit and wait and we will be in Shangri-La. It seems that modern capitalism has lifted millions out of their traditional working-class situation and blessed the general population with a variety of middle-class identities.

This ‘fading from contemporary importance’ of the working class is, however, brought about only by simple assertion and re-definition. Underlying the subdivision of society into seven new classes is an unstated commitment to a belief in the benefits of contemporary capitalism, which have diminished the working class. (This is made possible only by the study’s refusal to focus on structures of exploitation, which I shall return to shortly.) This focus leads to an insistence that society is largely made up of different forms of middle-class experience: established middle class, technical middle class, and so on. These new classes are more or less arbitrarily defined in terms derived from Pierre Bourdieu’s focus on social, cultural, and economic capital.[1] So, it is not at all clear that the people or their experience have changed. Only their label has changed. Or, more precisely: certain aspects of character, which depend on circular reasoning about the ‘status’ of social and cultural forms, are taken to be more significantly determinative of lived experience in Britain than the economic factors which influence material existence, the reality of being alive and struggling to remain so in comfort, good health, and security.

The political implications of this kind of thinking are obvious and terrible. The view it supports is that ours is a majority middle-class country, with an elite that is so small that we needn’t worry about trying to tame it and a poor that is reassuringly shrinking (or being incarcerated when welfare dependency brings out the nascent evil in them, if the Daily Mail is to be believed – which of course it isn’t). Martin Kettle notes in today’s Guardian that our three political parties – traditionally representing the upper, middle, and lower classes – now only represent a minority of the population, which he takes to explain their problematic relation to society. I think that he’s right about the problem with our politics but entirely wrong about the details. The old classes only represent a minority on this tendentiously defined model; they remain as heuristically powerful as ever in explaining the class structure of Britain. What is more striking is the fact that all three parties, which espouse functionally identical positions on economics, social issues, law and order, education, health care, the military, etc., are reflected by this research. The research does not, as Kettle supposes, demonstrate that our politics is out of step with our world. On the contrary, the closeness of fit between the assumptions underlying our politics and research like this demonstrate the incredible ideological efficiency of postmodern capitalism, which so distorts our politics and economics that we worry about catering for tiny differences in the comfortable middle classes at the expense of addressing the structural exploitation by the elite of the middle and in particular the lower classes.

[Next: Exploitation in contemporary society]

The results of the BBC-sponsored ‘Great British Class Survey’ were widely publicized yesterday (see the footnote for the academic study on which they are based, and a link).[1] The chief claims are that the layperson’s subdivision of British society into upper, middle, and lower classes is out of date, and that the people exhibiting qualities associated with those classes make up less than half of the current British population. In place of the tripartite system we should establish a seven-part division of society (the seven types are described here) in which the traditional working class is disappearing and the population is largely made up of shades of middle-class experience. It is no surprise that this research should have been commissioned at the present moment of political and economic history (i.e. the Thatcherite epoch), and while surely not deliberate, it is a sickening irony that the diverting and soothing check-your-own-class online questionnaire should have been made public only two days after the government’s apocalypse of the British welfare system.

Many people on Facebook and Twitter have already observed that, if you tweak your answers a little this way and that, particularly concerning which cultural forms interest you, your class diagnosis can fly widely from low to high. I’m not so interested in this diagnostic failure of what is in any case a crude questionnaire (I’ll give the researchers credit for a much more sophisticated interpretation of contextual information than this simple tool allows), and will instead focus, in three short companion blogposts, on just three problems that I see circulating around it

1. It represents a tendentious interpretation of the material experience of contemporary Britons;
2. It obscures the role of exploitation in society;
3. It demonizes counter-cultural forms of thought and feeling.

But before I start with these three points, the reason for this widely observed problems with the diagnostic tool should be explained. It is because there is a decisive methodological problem with the study, which purports to offer an answer to questions such as ‘What social status is an academic?’ by focusing on three ‘capitals’: social, cultural, and economic. The professed aim is to produce a more nuanced picture of class reality than a simple focus on the economics would do. To determine the status of an academic, then, it asks questions about social contact. Which people do you know? Cleaners? Accountants? Academics? If you tick ‘university lecturer’, you will find that the measure of the social status of your friends rises to the highest level. This might seem an unproblematic assumption: surely academics are of a high social status. But isn’t this what the methodology is meant to be determining? The assumed high status of academics is then fed into the calculation of the social capital of the individual (the academic) doing the questionnaire, and the outcome will be a nuanced picture of the social status of that individual (that academic). There is, in short, a circularity to the investigation. Certain jobs are assumed to be fixed to certain social statuses, and they cannot be statuses that have been determined by this methodology, because the methodology requires them to be in place already at the start. Identical problems exist with the cultural-capital questions, which assume that certain cultural forms are inextricably linked with certain social statuses. I’ll return to these later. But the tests for both social and cultural capital are so circular that they distort the outcome of the investigation. They should be removed, to leave only the measure of economics (suddenly the seven class types then begin to seem more accurate). Incidentally, I know four academics, all from working-class backgrounds, all earning more or less the same amount, who have done the test. Their results came out as ‘elite’, ‘established middle class’, ‘new affluent workers’, and ‘emergent service workers’ depending on the friends or cultural interests they admitted to. There’s no way that this methodology can reliably determine such a wide range of outcomes when the outcome is already assumed from the start.

On, then, to the first of the three main problems with this study: its tendentious outline of the material reality of contemporary Britain. [Click here]