The working class

The world has over 2.8 billion wage-workers today (2,806 million in 1997, according to the World Bank). Of those, about 550 million work in industry, and 850 million in services.

Of the 1.4 billion in agriculture, an increasing number work under more-or-less modern capitalist social relations, rather than in archaic or semi-feudal relations, but exact figures are unavailable. 40% of the population of the 'low and middle income' countries live in cities now, and 77% of the population of the 'high income' countries.

In the cities of the Third World, large and growing proportions of workers are 'informal' (in petty trade, repairs, transport, construction and contracted-out manufacturing). This work, as the International Labour Organisation notes, 'rarely involves a clear-cut employer-employee relationship: In Asia, the sector absorbs an average of 40 to 50% of the urban labour force, a proportion which rises to 65% in the poorer countries: In Africa, it is estimated the urban informal sector currently employs 61% of the urban labour force'.

Thus the wage-working class proper is surrounded by, and shades off at the edges into, a class, maybe equally large, of 'semi-proletarians'-people who scrape a living by varying combinations of petty trade, self-employment, theft, begging, domestic work and straightforward wage-work. But probably today, for the first time in history, the wage-workers and their periphery are a majority, or near a majority, of the population.

This is a tremendous shift. In Russia, at the time of the 1917 revolution, the wage-workers, both city and country, with their families, were only 17% of the population. Only 2% of the population lived in large cities. In Germany, the country which Marxists at that time cited as the epitome of high industrial development, fully 34% of the labour force were self-employed or working for their families. Of the agricultural workers (35% of the total), most still worked under feudal regulations (the Gesindeordnung, abolished only in 1918) which made them semi-serfs. Only 27% of the population lived in cities; only 11% in big cities (of over 300,000 people; all figures for 1910).

At the time Karl Marx published Capital vol 1, in 1867, the total employed in more-or-less modern capitalist industry in England and Wales (textiles, clothing, metalworking, mines, railways, gas, etc.) was just 1.7 million-17% or less of the population of working age. Other countries were far less industrially developed.

The increase of the wage-working class is not just one economic statistic among others. It has huge political and social implications. We sell our labour-power for a wage because other people, the capitalists, monopolise the means of production-large-scale means of production, which the individual worker cannot hope to own. Around those large-scale means of production, we are educated, trained and organised, and assembled in large numbers, primarily in cities. More and more these days, we move from job to job, the constant in our lives not being a particular trade or location but the social fact of being a wage-worker.

Class struggle

Built into the wage-bargain is constant conflict. How high or low will the wage be? Once having bought our labour-power, how much labour will the boss squeeze out of us? Against the boss, how far can we assert the priorities of our health, our nerves, and the human interests which we can pursue generally only outside the tyranny of work?

Wage-workers organise, in a way no other basic producing class ever has done. Today there are 164 million trade unionists world-wide (latest ILO figures, dated 1995). In 1869, two years after Marx published Capital, there were only 250,000 trade unionists in Britain, and hardly any in other countries.

Official statistics show a recent decline in trade union numbers. Part of that is real (a 16% drop in Western Europe, a 10% drop in Central and South America, and a 19% drop in Australia and New Zealand, in 1985-95). Part is artificial. The membership of trade unions in Eastern Europe and the USSR is sharply down, but now they are real (if weak) trade unions, where before they were police-state labour fronts.

In many key areas trade unionism is growing. In South Korea trade union membership grew 61% in 1985-95, in Taiwan 50%, in Thailand 77%, and in South Africa 127%. There are now 34 million trade unionists in Asia, not far short of the 41 million in Western Europe.

South Korean workers organised a tremendous general strike in January 1997. Their Confederation of Trade Unions finally won legal recognition from the government in November 1999. Workers played a central role in the overthrow of South Africa's apartheid (in 1993-4) and Indonesia's military dictatorship (in 1998). Increasing numbers of strikes and underground trade unions are challenging China's Stalinist state. Ecuador, Bolivia, Nigeria and many other countries saw mass political strikes in 1994-7.

Yet the growth of the working class as an organised force is not a linear process without reverses. Both the capitalists' constant quest for profits and the conscious actions of pro-business governments have destroyed or cowed traditionally well-organised and highly concentrated sectors of the working class, both in older industrial countries such as Britain and the US and in the former countries of the Stalinist bloc. The consequences of this can include: the destruction of previously stable and cohesive communities; whole generations without work; and a descent into crime, the drugs economy and individual self-betterment as the only 'solutions' on offer.

This is one factor in the recent decline in trade union numbers shown in official statistics. Part of that is real. The workers of the 'old' industrial countries do not dominate the world labour movement as they used to, but are far from a spent force. France's mass strikes in November-December 1995 involved more workers in positive activity (meetings, delegations to other workplaces to spread the action, demonstrations) than the famous general strike of May-June 1968.

Such class struggles have a society-changing logic both in countries where most workers would describe themselves as broadly 'socialist' or 'communist' (like France) and in those (like Indonesia or Korea) where the words 'socialist' and 'communist' convey only images of brutality and enforced uniformity. A large-scale class struggle inevitably raises the question of who owns and controls the social wealth, the means of production. It points towards a definite answer-that the means of production should be owned in common, and their use democratically planned for the common good rather than being governed by a destructive, greedy race to expand the already-gross wealth of rival profiteers.

Capitalism

In the year 2000, humanity has greater resources and possibilities to change the world for the better than ever before. To turn these possibilities into reality, it is necessary first for the working class to transform itself into a conscious force for that change. This faces both material and ideological obstacles. One thing that holds us back is the idea that progress is impossible and meaningless or alternatively that it has already reached its highest point.

The idea of capitalism as the height of progress was shattered first by World War One and the great slump of the 1930s, and is repeatedly discredited again and again in our days. The Asian-centred world economic crisis of 1997-9; the rapid increase in global economic inequality; the vast numbers of people still malnourished (800 million, and more every day); the fact that one child in three worldwide grows up in absolute poverty; the homeless and wretched in the oh-so-booming USA itself-all these mock pro-capitalist optimism.

In order to satisfy its constant appetite for profit, capitalism is becoming more and more wasteful-creating a stream of unnecessary and short-lived new commodities plugged by advertising-and more and more destructive of the environment. It is turning all areas of human endeavour, knowledge and social existence-including the very basis of life itself-into things to be bought and sold. Its self-proclaimed economic triumphs merely serve to create a growing sense of social and moral crisis in which global and national inequalities are more and more blatant, the maintenance of the status quo becomes more and more cynical and its claims to democracy more and more hollow.

While a growing section of youth is in revolt against this, even pro-market ideologues today accept that little 'progress', can be expected. This is as good as it gets! All the future can promise is more of the same.

Pro-capitalist triumphalism has had any revival at all only because of the ruin of its mainstream rivals-the Stalinist and social-democratic ideas of progress. But, among that majority who cannot accept the claims of capital, the common alternative conclusion is that all progress is a deceptive myth. The idea of reconstructing the world according to reason was just an illusion, pushed along by the intoxication of the first great spurt of science and technology in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In fact, they say, try to reconstruct the world according to reason, and you end up with Stalinism-or, at best, with a stultifying, stagnating 'nanny state'.

This thinking draws nourishment not only from obvious political facts but also from developments in science. David Hilbert, maybe the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, has his motto inscribed on his grave:

'We must know. We will know.' Since then some of the problems so confidently lined up for solution by Hilbert have been proved insoluble by other mathematicians. We will never know! We have to learn how to cope with not knowing! Quantum theory, chaos theory-some of the most talked-about developments of 20th century science are ones which indicate that in some fields we can only ever get broad, approximate understanding.

Despite this, capitalism has seen a vast growth in human knowledge, albeit one terribly distorted by the subjugation of its production to the needs of capital, war and the state. The development of knowledge does not lead humanity to a situation where every problem is solved and nothing further can be learnt. As new knowledge develops, it reveals problems, uncertainties, complications. This fact certainly does undermine Fabian, Stalinist, technocratic notions that the world can be made paradise if only the proper experts are allowed to plan everything.

But those notions are not the actual alternative to capitalism. The working-class socialist alternative is different. We do not base ourselves on any expert's claim to have the ideal blueprint for harmony and prosperity. We base ourselves on the 'planning' already accomplished. Co-operative, socialised production is not an ideal scheme invented by socialists. It is a reality developed by capitalism. With immense amounts of trial and error, and with cruel contradictions due to its subordination to capitalist private profit, it has nevertheless already brought great progress. We have a machinery of production which even today-without any planned reorganisation, without any drive to bring into useful jobs the 150 million or so people unemployed worldwide, and the hundreds of millions of others stuck in futile and unproductive jobs-could, just by an equalising redistribution of revenue, give everyone in the world the average living standard of a relatively well-off South European worker. The arithmetic is simple: divide global production by the number of households in the world. Everyone could have the basics-good food, a comfortable home, adequate clothing, education, health care-without having to deprive anyone else.

That is progress. So is the creation of a world working class, larger, more educated, richer in its variety and individuality but also more interlinked between its different segments, with a proven capacity to organise collectively. Our idea is that the collective and democratic organisation of that working class can direct the co-operative, socialised production already created better than can the competition of private profiteers.

In a world where that competition of private profiteers increasingly finds its decisive expression in the roller-coasters of financial markets-the 'casino economy'-that socialist proposition is more convincing than ever. The gap between actuality and the progress to be made by a concerted, conscious human redirection of our affairs is larger than ever.

The idea of progress has been discredited not because progress has failed, but because in recent decades both real and illusory social improvement has been brutally reversed. The advanced capitalist welfare states, the highest achievements of capitalist civilisation, are being systematically trashed.

Mass unemployment has become endemic in every capitalist country. Although income-per-head figures are still rising in most countries, there is some solid evidence that they are increasingly deceptive.

Defeats

Social improvement has not hit some mysterious natural limit. It has been reversed because the working class has suffered severe defeats. The advances that we had were not handed down by capitalist generosity. They were won by many years of working-class struggle. When the workers are defeated, as we were in Britain in the great watershed of the 1984-5 miners' strike, then we lose those gains.

The collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and the USSR, in 1989-91, was not a defeat for the working class. It was progress, inasmuch as it opened up possibilities for the workers in those states to think, debate, and organise more or less freely. It also cleared ground for working-class politics elsewhere in the world, by demolishing and dumping the illusion that police-state planned economies constituted (albeit in an as-yet-unsatisfactory 'deformed' way) the actual progressive alternative to capitalism.

In the short term, however, the demolition of illusions was also a demolition of morale. The apparent alternative to capitalism is shown to be a fake? Then maybe no alternative is possible!

Some argue that the working class's defeats and setbacks have been inevitable, either because the working class is in decline or because capitalism has shown itself to have far more scope for further development than socialists previously thought and obviously still has further scope.

The working class is not in decline, but increasing world-wide. The conclusion that it is in decline can be reached only by defining 'working-class' only as blue-collar workers in a few traditional industries (mining, metalworking, and so on) and excluding white-collar or service workers. But why should we do that? The working class is the class of those who sell their labour-power to work under the command of capital, whatever they produce.

Crisis

It disorients socialists if we believe (as some do) that world capitalism has been 'stuck' in its 'final crisis' of around 1921 continuously for the last 80 years, and all its development and expansion since then has been mere illusion and secondary detail. But the proper conclusion is not that the crisis of European capitalism in 1917-23 was not potentially final-it is very hard to give an explanation of the defeats of the revolutionary workers' movements of those years in Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary and other countries based on some intangible extra strength that the bourgeoisie derived from the fact their system would be able to have a new and unprecedented 'golden age' 25 years later, but easy enough to explain it from the mishaps and mistakes of the working-class left. We can explain, also, how the monstrous historical detour of Stalinism-though it was scarcely a manifestation of the vitality of capitalism!-disabled the working-class left for decades after that crisis.

Nor should we think that our task now is to wait for the real final crisis. There will be no definitive final crisis. Capitalism will not break down of its accord. It will have to be broken down. But it creates-is still creating and augmenting-the force that will break it down, the working class.

Production is increasingly socialised and cooperative. Claims that the giant capitalist enterprise is being made obsolete by a great flowering of small-scale capitalist enterprises and pure market mechanisms are false. As the US economist Bennet Harrison shows in his detailed study Lean and Mean, 'The emerging global economy remains dominated by concentrated, powerful business enterprises. Indeed, the more the economy is globalised, the more it is accessible only to companies with a global reach: Rather than dwindling away, concentrated economic power is changing its shape, as the big firms create all manner of networks, alliance, short and long-term financial and technology deals-with one another, with governments at all levels, and with legions of generally smaller firms who act as their suppliers and subcontractors'.

The consolidation of the world working class into a political force is, of course, far from automatic. It is a huge and difficult job. It requires both a renewed experience of struggle and ideological rearmament. In some countries with a young working class, this will start from a new workers' movement seeking to assert itself both in the workplace and politically. In countries with long-established and bureaucratically dominated labour movement structures, it will take the form of renovating the existing movements, making them responsive to working class needs and asserting those needs in the political arena. The rejuvenation of these movements will depend on their ability to organise and represent the needs of the unorganised and on their having a real, living democracy.

This does not mean that the working class will need to go through all the experiences of the last 100 years again. Both the involvement of workers in struggle and the role of Marxists as 'the memory of the class' mean that we are not starting from a clean slate. It does not mean going back to the pre-1914 'Marxist orthodoxy' of 'slow but steady'. It does not imply losing a sense of urgency. It requires revolutionaries to organise on 'Leninist' lines (coherently, on a sharp political basis). However, it does mean that we cannot leave it to inevitable forces of either capitalist development or crisis to do the job for us.

The national question

One chief difficulty is nationalism. Many writers argue that Marxist socialism has failed because it could only understand class conflicts, and thus was bewildered by the scope and size of national conflicts in the 20th century.

But one of the main distinctive points of Marxist socialism, historically, as against the many socialist schools of thought prior to it, was its close combination of the idea of socialism with that of democracy. Democracy, to Marx and Engels and the radical democrats of their day, obviously included the democratic rights of nations. As Engels put it:

'When [in the 1830s] the extreme politicians of the greater part of civilised Europe came into contact with each other, and attempted to mark out a kind of common programme, the liberation and unification of the oppressed and subdivided nations became a watchword common to all of them: There could, indeed, be no two opinions as to the right of every one of the great national subdivisions of Europe to dispose of itself, independently of its neighbours, in all internal matters, so long as it did not encroach upon the liberty of others. This right was, in fact, one of the fundamental conditions of the internal liberty of all.'

What has disarmed much of the socialist movement in the 20th century, when faced with nationalism, is not some doctrinally-inspired reluctance to recognise national facts, but the wholesale and opportunist submergence of socialism into nationalism practised by Stalinism, which has also infected the anti-Stalinist left. The USSR's bureaucracy saw that nationalist movements might be made allies if the bureaucracy could present itself as a reliable and potent counterweight to the Western states against which those movements rebelled. So, without scruple or conscience, again and again the bureaucrats directed Communist Parties to embrace not merely national rights, but nationalism, and not to recoil or complain at any chauvinist or revanchist excesses.

In place of a programme of consistent democracy was erected a picture of the world divided into 'good nations', oppressed and freedom-seeking, and 'bad nations'. Who was good, and who bad, varied of course with the shifts of USSR foreign policy.

On the national question, as on the question of 'final crisis', the socialist movement needs to reconstruct itself intellectually and purge the legacies of Stalinism.

Democracy

And on democracy, too. The Stalinist movement spoke much of democracy. Stalin's 1936 constitution was 'the most democratic in the world'. The states he conquered in Eastern Europe were 'people's democracies'. The word 'democracy' was levered away from any definite content, and became a makeweight phrase for agitation.

The great capitalist classes are doing much the same thing today, in a different way. There are more of the forms of representative democracy in the world today than ever before. Not only the ex-Stalinist states of Eastern Europe, but also the ex-military dictatorships of Latin America, have multi-party elections and parliaments.

Yet in the most advanced capitalist country, the USA, which also has more voting than anywhere else, democracy is rotting apace. Fewer and fewer people bother to vote. Politics becomes more and more a game played by rich people with the media, with the mass of the people as bemused spectators of a raucous parade of trivialities, scandals, personality-projections and image-creating exercises which drive out real political information and debate.

Those same mass-media could be channels for spreading information and debate much wider than ever before. What makes them the opposite is the media monopolies' greed for safe, secure profits-made by cultivating the crassest, and thus most reliable, desires of their public-by disinformation and dumbing-down.

Democracy, progress, science-all these words carry a bitter taste with them as the century ends, because of the misuse of the words, and of the realities, by Stalinism and by capitalism. In the hands of their proper owners, the organised working class, those same words will be the keynotes for the future.

Add amendment accepted into the main motion

The far right continue to be a lurking, and rising, danger in Europe and elsewhere (Russia, the USA), as the recently formed coalition government in Austria shows. In the EU, the largest far-right groups are not fully-fledged fascist, in the sense that their activities remain largely electoral, and they do not have armed gangs of thugs roaming the streets as the Nazis did. Nevertheless, their links with more extremist neo-Nazis are often considerable, and their 'respectability' helps outright neo-Nazis to grow. And they are themselves dangerous, encouraging the growth, for example, of racism. Combatting them is vital for the left and the labour movement. In particular, the arguments against racism must be a priority for the left, including against legislation on asylum seekers, etc.