Response: Working-Class Dissolution

Abstract

One of the pitfalls of analysis at the megahistorical level is overdetermina tion?not in the Althusserian sense of the superstructure as an inde pendent source of causation; rather, more generically, in the impossibility of narrowing down explanation to the sort of economic causal nexus called for in theory construction. Tilly's stimulating essay is a case in point. While there is no doubt labor's in the region where they originated are declining, and while this region, together with the rest of the world, is indeed experiencing globalization, the decline can be accounted for just as well by an epochal transformation of basic economic activity. As Daniel Bell suggested two decades ago, we are at the dawn of post-industrial society.1 Driven by an unprecedented avalanche of technological innovations, contemporary changes amount to an evolutionary step in the development of the pro ductive forces to which Marx attributed explanatory primacy.2 Whether or not one subscribes to Marx's theory of history, there is every reason to expect that such a profound transformation will bring about fundamental changes in class structure. While we may not be able to discern precisely what the new day will bring, one thing is quite certain: Much as the advent of industrial capitalism brought about conditions that fostered the formation of the distinctive social formation we term working class, the waning of these conditions undermines its continued existence. In short, while engaged in his whirlwind tour d'horizon, Tilly fails to see that the workers to whose struggles we owe the rights of labor are rapidly disappearing and today constitute a residual endangered species.3