“Traffic wardens, soldiers, gardeners…”

A review of Exiting the Factory: Strikes and Class Formation beyond the Industrial Sector (two volumes) by Alexander Gallas (Bristol University Press, 2024), £80 and £85

Until the 1990s, social theory attached importance to the influence of work and to social class, including the relationship between them. Alexander Gallas’s two-volume book is a welcome example of a renewed attempt to demonstrate the “enduring theoretical, analytical and political relevance of the concept of ‘class’” and to see its importance manifested in developments at work and in industrial relations.1 He observes a pessimism about the future of socialism, commonly flowing from the decline of traditional proletarian occupations, and labour movement organisations based upon them. From there, Gallas examines the theory of class as applied to the growing number of non-industrial workers in his first volume and, in the second volume, their increased propensity to take strike action. A key assumption is that “strikes are points where class relations crystallise in greater clarity than in other social situations. It is here that the connection between the organisation of work in capitalist societies and social conflict comes into view”.2 The conclusion that new forces of working-class organisation and power are being formed is welcomed. Unfortunately, the books as a whole are not very useful vehicles to undertake this journey.

Prospects for socialism: conflicting perspectives

Gallas’s contribution is part of a series of recent writings concerned with examining the significance of the decline in weight of groups that have traditionally been considered the core elements of the Western working class. Huw Beynon and Ray Hudson, for instance, have produced a detailed and sensitive account of the violence that has been visited upon British miners and their communities in the process of the destruction of coalmining. Their account, located in a more general movement accelerated by the miners’ defeat, illustrates:

A wider story of the dramatic decline in the country’s productive capacity and its transformation into an asset-based economy—a globalised bazaar of hedge funds, shopping malls, warehouses, fulfilment centres and call and contact centres, propped up by increasingly cash-strapped public services. Jobs in the new economy were increasingly low-waged and insecure, mocking Conservative and New Labour promises of a high-skilled, high-wage future.3

Although both authors are oppose the pessimistic perspectives that could flow from this picture of a shrunken, disorganised and less powerful working class, it is easy to see how this quote could be used to question the possibilities of socialism. Gallas illustrates conflicting interpretations through the perspectives of Manuel Castells and Leo Panitch. The former states that “capital tends to escape in its hyperspace of pure circulation, while labour dissolves its collective entity into an infinite variation of individual existences”.4 In contrast, Panitch contends that “in the advanced capitalist world the decline in the size of the traditional industrial labour force is accompanied by the proletarianisation of many service and professional occupations and the spread of more unstable, casual and contingent employment”.5 Whereas Castells sees “post-industrial” capitalism resulting in individualisation, which undermines the possibilities of solidarity between workers and the possibility of socialism, Panitch regards these changes as a reflection of the ceaseless development of capitalism. He looks for new worker solidarities outside of the industrial sectors.

At various points, Gallas turns back to these opposing positions to adjudicate in favour Panitch’s view, a verdict that would likely upset few socialists, but one that reduces the complexity of the societal developments. As Gabriel Winant has persuasively argued, there is a need to revisit the debates about the changing nature of class relations and formations that blossomed in the 1970s, debates closed in the 1990s by demoralisation following the visible decline of working-class organisations. Winant advocates a perspective that maintains the unitary notion of the working class in an abstract sense, while acknowledging social variation of working-class history and experience. In practice, he complains, there has been “far too little attention to the social experiences of labour markets, employment, and unemployment that mediate the concrete existence of the proletariat; labour processes, skill, and deskilling; labour-market segmentation by race and gender; family form, reproduction, and demography”.6 Judged by this call for a more ambitious agenda, Gallas’ book proves to be a disappointment.

Class perspectives: leaning on Nicos Poulantzas

The idea of social class is operationalised every day by official statistics or surveys that classify people and group them into classes. The most frequent and obvious outcomes are that managers and professionals are seen as middle class and that employed manual employees are workers. These classification systems and boundaries have become almost commonsensical, underpinned by the fact of unequal earnings of these respective groups. Yet, as Gallas points out, economic inequalities in employment tell us nothing about the social and economic interactions between these “classes” and, importantly, allow the owners of capital to escape visibility and scrutiny. Nor does Gallas give credence to more recent trends in which “class is first and foremost an identity, which is formed through acts of referring to oneself and others in class terms”.7 This subjective approach is ultimately of little use, because people whose material circumstances are identical, but whose culture and lifestyle choices differ, would find themselves in different classes.8 As he asserts: “the existence of class relations does not hinge on the question of whether people see themselves or others as members of a class—or if they deny altogether any class belonging”.9 Importantly, he insists that the objective nature of class relations in no way denies the social domination of the interests of capital, the alienation and mystification that flows from it, or the need for struggle to promote a socialist alternative worldview.

Gallas’s reiteration of the Marxist understanding of class and the state is, however, heavily influenced by the writings of Nicos Poulantzas. This influence has some value when it comes to linking the relationship of the state and ideology with the underpinning of capitalist dominance at work. This stress provides a useful corrective to many writings on work and the labour process that either take class relations at work as obvious, removing the need for examination, or deny the impact of wider class relations on work processes, relations and consciousness.10 Gallas writes:

The regime of ownership, the division of tasks and the order of knowledge only exist if there is a state with capacities to legitimise and defend—if need be by resorting to overt force—the ownership of the means of production and the resulting distribution of social wealth; that safeguards the decision-making authority of capitalists at the level of the firm; and that underpins, with the help of this authority, their self-conception of being expert business people.11

Poulantzas’s emphasis on the importance of the state aside, there is much of his approach that is less useful. His overall class theory, specifically its unnecessarily narrow criteria for membership of the working class, cannot be said to align with Marx’s. Poulantzas unconditionally narrows working-class membership to those whose labour “produces surplus value while directly reproducing the material elements that serve as the substratum of the relation of exploitation”.12 This definition automatically excludes all service workers, workers in the sphere of circulation and all state employees (other than those directly productive workers in nationalised industries and public transport)­—exactly those non-industrial categories on which Gallas rests his analysis of growing working-class formation.

For Karl Marx, by contrast, it is the relationship of labour to capital that is the decisive factor of class, not the physical nature of the labour. Teachers employed by private schools, for instance, are productive workers. Teachers in public schools are unproductive workers, but their class membership does not differ.13 Significantly, no extended consideration is given by either Poulantzas or Gallas to the nature of capitalist work itself, that is, the importance of the labour process in the identification of activities that play a central part in the production of surplus value and surplus labour in class determination.14

Similar to Poulantzas, Gallas further restricts the working class by the exclusion of supervisors and the like due to the “political” role they play by ensuring the extraction of surplus value from the direct producers. Although this is a commonplace and understandable consideration, qualification is also necessary. First, care must be taken not to be misled by occupational titles rather than the real relations of work.15 As Marx states (and Poulantzas acknowledges), the role of management has dual aspects, not only supervising and controlling the labour of others but also engaging in the coordination of collective labour (and possibly directly productive work as well). Tasks of coordination, Marx insists, are necessary under any form of socialised production and thus part of the collective worker. The allocation and performance of these tasks of supervision and coordination are significant in determining their contribution either to production, or alternatively, to their supervision of the extraction of surplus and, thus, in the assessment of their immediate class interests and alignment.

An additional exclusionary mechanism is the stricture that to be working class it is necessary to perform exclusively manual, as opposed to mental, labour. Thus, engineers and technicians are immutably members of the “new petty bourgeoisie”, even though they perform productive work, because, for Poulantzas, they are always part of a system of ideological domination stemming from the distinction between mental and manual labour:

Every form of work that takes the form of knowledge from which the direct producers are excluded, falls on the mental side of the of the capitalist production process, irrespective of its empirical natural content, and this is so whether the direct producers actually do know how to perform the work but do not do so (again not by chance) or whether they in fact do not know how to perform it (since they are systematically kept away from it), or whether there is quite simply nothing to be known.16

Having attacked the “incongruities of empirical definitions of types of labour”, Poulantzas substitutes a vague, catch-all definition of the distinction between “mental” and “manual” labour. The very vagueness makes the concept inoperable, encouraging readers to apply the same “empirical definitions of types of labour” (white-collar work, professional) that he rejects. Poulantzas thereby ignores Marx’s writing on the labour process, particularly on the division of labour and its contribution to the formation of the collective worker.

Because Poulantzas effectively excludes most public sector employees from the working class—closing any influence here for the role of struggle in the formation of classes—Gallas’s research is left with a major problem. One attempt to reconcile the structural analysis of Poulantzas with the importance of struggle is through supplementing it with other perspectives. Reference is made to Rosa Luxemburg’s account of the growth of working-class sentiments and organisation up to the 1905 revolution in Russia:

Class feeling is not an accumulation of experiences that results in a fixed, socialist worldview…it emerges as a sudden reaction to shifted social conditions in which frustrations and indignation caused by one’s working and living conditions crystallise in a political stance.17

He likewise refers to EP Thompson’s popular formulation that:

Class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences…feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs. The class experience is largely determined by the productive relations into which men are born – or enter involuntarily.18

The claim that Poulantzas and Thompson share common perspectives does not stand up to scrutiny.19 Gallas makes no reference, for instance, to the sharp differences between Thompson’s defence of historical perspectives and the structural determinism of Poulantzas.20

The emphasis on struggle as a catalyst for class formation contradicts Poulantzas’s rigid framework. However, it is only one of the ways that Gallas attempts to deal with the consequences of the sway of Poulantzas on his work. The same hesitant movement away from Poulantzas can be seen in the treatment of the state and its employees. Gallas’s initial perspectives show an imperviousness to the possibility of a state performing any role other than dominance and securing the continued existence and reproduction of capitalist relations of production. This one-sided emphasis has the consequence of excluding large groups from the working class. Citing a miscellaneous group comprising “traffic wardens, soldiers, gardeners looking after public parks or civil servants working for a ministry”, he states: “Many may see themselves as serving ‘the community’, ‘the public’ or ‘the nation’, but notions that state bodies are safeguarding the common good should be rejected anyway”.21

Clearly, the role of consciousness and struggle makes little impression here. Acknowledging the potential strength of organised labour inside the state, he finds further means to question its working-class potential, pointing to the professional nature of much of it and to the limited extent to which its members’ daily work lives are constrained by supervision and control. They are far from being oppressed:

Decision-making capacities concerning their work [are] such that their activities do not easily fit with the despotism claim, for example, medical doctors working for public health services, teachers working for state schools or academics working for public universities possess ample opportunities for developing their practical and intellectual faculties and presenting themselves as state-approved experts, which does not sit easily with the alienation claim. It follows that many publicly employed workers inhabit contradictory class locations.22

Clearly it is some time since Gallas spoke to teachers in the United States or Britain.23

Regardless of his exaggeration of the autonomy of layers of state employees, and his characterisation of them as occupying contrary class locations, he concedes that they may be attracted to the pole of labour: “Their strike activities can contribute to working-class formation—but this is only possible if there is evidence of processes of adsorption dragging their activities towards the side of labour”.24 However, the roles of consciousness and struggle operate within definite limits, as in accordance with Poulantzas’s initial formulation, the barrier between mental and manual labour cannot be overcome. “Adsorption” here plays the role of acknowledging the movement of state employees towards labour but not accepting them as equal members of the class. Adsorption is a scientific term describing the process of molecules sticking to a surface, contrasting with absorption, where molecules pass into a material. The term is adopted to signify the continued distinctive class nature of the moving group (non-working class) and its alignment with, but not absorption into, the working class. Hence, fealty to Poulantzas can be maintained while accommodating to the concrete and politically desirable developments.

Gallas’s discomfort with his own analytical contortions leads him to attempt to unravel the “conceptual complications” by designating labour relations in the public sector as unambiguously capitalist relations of production.25 This revision is justified by adoption of Bob Jessop’s idea of “the ‘ecological dominance’ of the capitalist mode of production over the overall social division of labour”.26 Through this mechanism, “exploitation takes place when surplus labour extraction takes place, and for this to happen it is not necessary that surplus value is produced“.27 This again breaks with Poulantzas’s schema by claiming that:

In terms of the regime of ownership, the division of tasks and the order of knowledge, are the same for many privately and publicly employed workers—and if the latter are faced with exploitation, despotism and alienation, they can be safely placed on the side of labour.28

Faced with groups of employees in the public sector that look like workers, talk like workers and act like workers, Gallas rightly wants to incorporate them into the idea of working-class formation. Even here, however, his formulation has problems. Most public sector employees are indeed workers, albeit not producing surplus value but surplus labour. The Marxist designation for workers in this situation is unproductive workers. The distinction between productive and unproductive labour was never intended to be used as the defining feature of class membership, nor does the category of productive worker denote a degree of proletarian superiority.29 The distinction is nevertheless important as capitalist political economy is founded on profit. Much activity in public sector work is based on satisfying social needs (albeit in a manner that supports or at least does not threaten capital’s hegemony). To conflate the social relations of public and private sector workers, suggesting no significant differences, raises the question of why public sector workers would want to oppose privatisations and why they should be supported in their opposition to them. Indeed, viewed through the prism of Poulantzas’ theory, privatisation might logically be welcomed as resulting in the expansion of the working class.

This is not the place to analyse how the specific configuration of classes is composed in the public sector. This would entail taking account of the fact that much state production for need, rather than profit, has been ravaged by austerity, subcontracting and privatisations that have transformed class relations. Labour processes have become unambiguously managed for profit, or managed with performance targets that are designed to act as proxies for profits and to intensify work.30 Gallas recognises that “the politics of austerity as a dominant mode of crisis management turned state apparatuses into key sites of class struggle, with publicly employed workers on the frontline”.31 Yet, he does not address how professional employees are being de-skilled, with the work of a minority transformed through the shedding of advisory, supportive and coordinating roles into more supervisory roles, and the rest made redundant or degraded into workers concerned with meeting targets.32

Strikes in non-industrial workplaces

The major purpose of volume two is to indicate the growing importance of strikes in the non-industrial sectors of many capitalist economies and to argue that union demands demonstrate a movement towards class consciousness and class formation. In volume one, Gallas recognises unions as a far-from-perfect indicator of this process. His reservations will be familiar to those with analyses that recognise the limits as well as the possibilities of trade unionism. The way they are functioning can reflect competition between workers as well as their solidarity, the existence of a conservative layer of leaders (a trade union bureaucracy) and the reinforcement of their position through the institutionalisation of industrial relations and procedures. Unions therefore “represent the interests of labour but are also forced to mediate them with those of capital”, with trade union officials tending “to act as both class warriors and ‘managers of discontent’”.33 Gallas notes that “strikes, more than other forms of action, shape labour relations, class formation and, by implication, class relations”.34 He also asserts that conservative influences continue to operate on the nature of trade union demands and the conduct of strikes. To capture this observation, Gallas makes the distinction between, on the one hand, actions that “are guided by the principle of inclusive solidarity” and in doing so contribute towards class formation. On the other, there are actions that consolidate class partition by being based on exclusive solidarity that organises a clearly demarcated constituency and remains closed to everyone else.35 He also recognises, however, that the analytical distinction may not always be clear in practice. Unfortunately, these insights are insufficiently used when detailing the different strike motivations, the demands and processes of the strikes in the three case studies.

Gallas’s case studies centre on: the German railway disputes 2015-5 and 2021; the British junior doctors dispute 2016; and the Spanish Woman’s Day strikes in 2018 and 2019. The appropriateness of the selection can be questioned. Gallas justifies these cases because they are “strikes led by organisations that cannot be easily presumed to commit themselves to militancy, class struggle and working-class unity”.36 This is a notably different and much narrower rationale than the original one of adjudicating between negative and positive implications of deindustrialisation for socialism. The German railway study focuses on how unions negotiate inter-union competition, not on the prime question posed, namely non-industrial labour and its relationship to class formation. Transport employees (excluding managers and supervisory personnel) are unambiguously workers, even in Poulantzas’s schema. Nor is the railway industry a sunrise industry compensating for the decline of industrial sectors. From 1989 to 2021, the German railway system lost 280,000 workers, over half of its workforce. Those remaining were subject to techniques imported from the private sector, such as lean production and administration. There are interesting observations to be made about changes in workers’ consciousness under neoliberalism, but the focus cannot resolve the question of whether there are newly emergent forces that will substitute for declining ones in manufacture. The case study as a result ends up being rich in detail but theoretically weak. Having spent some time in volume one outlining the complexities of class analysis and the internal relations of unions and the existence of a trade union bureaucracy, not many of the insights play a role in his account.

The British junior doctors’ dispute provides a better focus. Pressures throughout the NHS, with intensification of work, extended hours, privatisation and falling real wages did not bypass junior doctors, and there has been a very real sense in which their relationship to work, employment, trade unionism and industrial action has been transformed. The question of proletarianisation, and its reflection in trade union organisation and demands, is of some relevance. However, concentration on the nature of their immediate strike demands and levels of rhetorical support from other unions, gives us little information of the underlying and long-term transformation of day-to-day social relations of class. Again, the divisions within the union, in this case clearly visible tensions between junior doctors and the more conservative, controlling, consultant-based leadership of the British Medical Association, is hardly touched upon. A short addendum on the subsequent and more militant 2023-4 dispute, that arose directly from the unsatisfactory conclusion of the earlier one, would have been welcome. In terms of the more general concern with adsorption, it would have made more sense to have a wider look at health sector trade unionism. It is not at all clear which other tendencies the junior doctors could have adhered to. Traditionally, Unison, the union for most of the staff (cleaners, porters, secretaries, ancillary staff and some nurses), has been weak and ineffectual. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) similarly has a less than robust profile, although there are signs of changes in both organisations.37

The third case study, that of general and feminist strikes in Spain, also has problems. As Gallas notes of the actions, “they were outrightly political from the start”.38 As being political in nature is already one of Gallas’ indications of class formation, it leads to an inevitably positive conclusion about the possibilities of the movement towards class formation. Moreover, there is little precision about the composition of the strikers, their relationship to non-industrial work and as to whether much of the action documented is strike action—as opposed to demonstrations, which do not involve withdrawal of labour. This is not to diminish the significance of the militancy displayed in the accounts but merely to say they do not address the problems originally identified.

Conclusion

The promise of the book is a focus on the changing occupational and class structure of capitalist societies as international industrial relocation and rising manufacturing productivity have shifted job growth to services. In both public and private sectors, these processes have driven a degradation of work and worsening of pay and conditions. It was precisely to understand this movement and its significance for class relations that Braverman wrote Labor and Monopoly Capital (1975). Gallas makes not a single mention of this work, relying instead on Poulantzas, with the result that the closer Gallas approaches concrete analysis, the less he utilises the adopted theory. Initially based on class analysis that unjustifiably excludes many in wage labour and state employment from the working class, Gallas finds his intention to use strikes as an indicator of working-class formation obstructed by his adopted definitions. The attempt to use additional and partially contradictory theoretical approaches introduces further incoherence as changes to class criteria are introduced without a re-evaluation of the starting points. As a consequence, the theoretical perspectives on class and the nature of trade unionism are barely utilised when examining the significance of the case studies.

The case studies are themselves poorly selected. Case studies are normally adopted when wanting to determine the influence and development of characteristics or forces. Gallas has selected cases that do not illustrate the main problem he identifies: the prospect of the organisation and militancy of non-industrial labour.

Finally, the book does not warrant two volumes and would have benefitted from a more editorial intervention. Annoyingly, the phrase “in a nutshell” was employed 49 times. More seriously, the structure and continuity of the text could have been rationalised if more attention was paid to the target audience. Much of the first volume (65 pages), for instance, is taken up with long discussions aimed at “promoting a class-analytical agenda for labour studies and a class-oriented strategy for organised labour”.39 So, we have discussions on Antonio Gramsci and organic intellectuals, the contradictions and complicity of academics in class domination, the ethics of research and a critique of the power-resources approach. These discussions are neither wrong nor uninteresting, but they are largely superfluous to the main theme of the book and would have been better published in an academic journal. These discussions present an obstacle. Most committed scholars, socialists and trade unionists would have been satisfied with a simple declaration of his own stance and him getting on with the main theme in a clearer and more straightforward manner.

Bob Carter was Professor of Work and Employment Relations at the University of Leicester. He is author of Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (Routledge, 2015) as well as a number of articles on lean production, trade unions and the restructuring of public sector labour.

Notes