Contemporary Working Class Research Articles

Wages for Housework: The Marxist-Feminist Case for Basic Income

This article explores the Marxist-feminist critique of capitalism of the International Feminist Collective (IFC) of the1970s and its Wages for Housework (WfH) campaign. WfH theorists, including Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, Marie Mies and Claudia von Werlhof, combine Marxist and feminist perspectives to articulate a compelling critique of capitalism designed to unite the entire working class, including both waged and unwaged workers. I argue that, despite the movement’s seemingly narrower slogan, the WfH demand was an implicit argument for an unconditional, individual, and universal basic income. Like other historical precedents of contemporary basic income movements, the WfH campaign was unsuccessful in achieving its policy goal. Despite its failure, its identification of unwaged housewives as workers, its extension of the concept of the housewife to precarious workers in the globalized economy, and its identification of the strategic deficiencies of mainstream working class and feminist movements are critical to contextualizing contemporary debates on basic income and to the development of successful strategies for contemporary working class movements.

(N)one of us? The case for descriptive representation of the contemporary working class

This article departs from the normative-theoretical literature on descriptive representation, which argues that some disadvantaged groups need a special form of representation. Most proponents of a guaranteed presence of women or ethnic minorities, however, do not believe that their arguments equally apply to social classes. The main reason is that the class cleavage historically structured many party systems, making ‘class issues’ extraordinarily present. However, party systems and industrial relations have vastly changed since then, altering the circumstances under which representation takes place. Evaluating the theoretical arguments for descriptive representation with the help of empirical insights on growing political marginalisation of lower-status classes, this article argues that the societal and political changes of the last decades justify descriptive representation of the contemporary working class.

Class identity of the working-class youth in contemporary Russia

The article considers the social self-identification of the Russian working youth and its class identity. The relevance of the topic is due to the need to search for basic indicators of the identity of the working class in the post-industrial era as connected with the fundamental differences between wage labour in the service sectors from the labour of industrial workers. The article presents an overview of contemporary concepts of multiple and fragmented identity, outlines the main vectors of controversy in the debates on identification processes and identity politics in contemporary societies; describes the basic features of the identification of the working class in the post-industrial era - the nature and content of labour; ownership of property and participation in the management of the enterprise. The contemporary working class is defined as a nonhomogeneous entity with internal differentiation determined by such factors as the form of employment, sphere of employment, income level, lifestyle and cultural capital. The empirical part of the research was implemented in the Ural Federal District in 2018 based on the mass and expert surveys. The results of the study prove that there are active processes of class formation in the Russian society; therefore, we need to revive the class approach to the description of the social structure. More than 50% of young people from the traditional industrial working class still identify themselves as members of this social group, while the same applies only to every third worker of routine service; and identification with the middle class loses popularity. The empirical data show the paradoxical nature of the working-class thinking and the instability of its basic orientations. The contradictory assessments and statements of the respondents confirm the vagueness of their class consciousness and the instability of their class identity.

The sociology of housework revisited: Just a housewife after all these years

This small study follows in the footsteps of Oakley’s (1974) The Sociology of Housework. Based on interviews with 40 London housewives more than 45 years after its publication, it is an exploration of the lived experience of five contemporary working class London housewives. Thematic Analysis revealed striking parallels with Oakley’s findings: nearly half a century later, gender ideologies are still restricting, damaging and confining some women into the home, with their work not acknowledged as work, with no independent selves, no control over finances and no way of meeting their personal needs.

Investigations of a journalistic blind spot: Class, constructors, and carers in Norwegian media

Abstract Recent studies argue that the contemporary working class has largely disappeared from the news media. Another strand of literature demonstrates that the traditional labour beat has lost newsroom prestige due to changes in the established news media and crisis in the labour movement. Analysing how traditional working-class sectors are covered in mainstream newspapers and trade union magazines over time, we conduct a systematic, quantitative content analysis of 18 months of coverage from 1996–2017. We find a steady decline in media coverage throughout the period, indicating that the labour beat as an established specialisation is disappearing. Studying topical emphasis and source practices demonstrates marked differences between the newspapers and the trade union magazines: The mainstream newspapers are elite- and conflict-oriented (although not hostile in their coverage), while the trade union magazines largely reflect power structures and the interests of the labour movement. In the discussion, the main findings from the content analysis are explained by practitioners, to contextualise and provide insider perspectives on the findings.

People and Power: Democracy after Brexit

AbstractThe result of the 2016 European Union (EU) referendum revealed a disconnect between policy makers and the public, particularly those who could be considered part of Britain’s contemporary working class. Whilst there has been significant attention paid to the parliamentary activity to agree the terms under which Britain will leave the EU, there has been comparatively less attention paid to the causes of the vote, and what can be done to improve public trust in democracy. This article proposes a new public attitudes‐led policy‐making model, using democratic innovations and design thinking, to reconnect policy making to the public and improve political equality.

Digital Platforms, Gig Economy, Precarious Employment, and the Invisible Hand of Social Class.

Digital platform capitalism, as exemplified by companies like Uber or Lyft has the potential to transform employment and working conditions for an increasing segment of the worforce. Most digital economy workers are exposed to the health damaging precarious employment conditions characteristic of the contemporary working class in high income countries. Just as with Guy Standing or Mike Savage's "precariat" it might appear that digital platform workers are a new social class or that they do not belong to any social class. Yet the class conflict interests (wages, benefits, employment and working conditions, collective action) of digital platform workers are similar to other members of the working class.

Where's the Working Class?

From the Communist Manifesto onwards, the self-emancipation of the working class was central to Marx’s thought. And so it was for subsequent generations of Marxists including the later Engels, the pre-WW1 Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci. But in much contemporary Marxist theory the active role of the working class seems at the least marginal and at the most completely written off. This article traces the perceived role of the working class in Marxist theory, from Marx and Engels, through the Second and Third Internationals, Stalinism and Maoism, through to the present day. It situates this in political developments changes in the nature of the working class over the last 200 years. It concludes by suggesting a number of questions about Marxism and the contemporary working class that anyone claiming to be a Marxist today needs to answer.

“The History of all Hitherto Existing Society:” Class Struggle and the Current Wave of Resistance

Across the last decade we have witnessed a growing wave of resistance across the globe. In this article we argue that it is critical to utilise class analysis to understand contemporary social movements. We maintain that class analysis begins with understanding class as a series of relations and/or processes that condition both the objective and subjective dimensions of class. Following this, we illustrate how sectors of the contemporary working class are in struggle, yet struggle differently, based on their structural location as well as differing nature of their resistance. In taking this approach to class and social movements, we argue that scholars can begin to unmask the central role of capitalism and the attending regimes of accumulation in the current wave of resistance even when they appear disconnected.

“Recurrence” and “Reconstitution”: The Rise of “New Workers” and the Transition of China's Social Structure—Marxist Class Theory and the New Changes in the Contemporary Working Class

Marxism claims that since the emergence of capitalism, the working class has always been the representative of the advanced productive forces, forces of promoting the development of advanced productivity, and the most progressive, promising class. However, with the adjustment of the world's industrial structure and the development of technologies such as the Internet, the Internet of things, the most developed countries have experienced the social phenomenon of the emergence of a “new middle class,” the new strata changes within the working class, and “white collar” labor outnumbering “blue collar” labor, etc. This has resulted in proclamations of the “extinction” of the working class, the decentralization of the working class, and the middle stratum theory, etc. These claims seem to have posed a question and challenge to Marxist class theory. Meanwhile, the massive emergence of China's “knowledge workers,” “migrant workers” and “private employees” has changed the traditional internal structure of the working class that mainly consisted of “manual workers,” “urban workers,” and “state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers” before. Therefore, how to view the rise of “new workers” in the world and China, and understand the “recurrence” and “reconstruction” of the working class in both China and the world in the new era have become important issues for Marxist class theory to address.

“Today I am worth”: K. Lorraine Graham’s Graph

“Today I am worth”:K. Lorraine Graham’s Graph Judith Goldman (bio) In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato presents “the increasing force of the creditor-debtor relationship” in the world remade by financial capitalism since the late 1970s (23). “Debt acts as a ‘capture,’ ‘predation,’ and ‘extraction’ machine on the whole of society,” he writes (29); “the creditor-debtor relation concerns the entirety of the current population as well as the population to come” (32). If, in the last chapter of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber exculpates contemporary working-class debtors, subject to decreased wages and plied continually with credit opportunities, for incurring debt to live life above the level of mere survival, floating consumption as conviviality or social participation, Lazzarato perhaps more absolutely deindividuates debt, for in this neoliberal epoch it always already profoundly conditions any given economic circuit, whether one’s transactions are mediated by payment plan or not.1 One concern that emerges from these excerpts from K. Lorraine Graham’s Graph – with its unstinting demonstrations of the subject’s inextricability from debt, the degree to which debt saturates social relations – is the strange morphology of economic non-agency in debt culture, the extended mutations of (the alibi of) the sovereign subject of contractual exchange. In this contemporary working class universe, a work “ethic” has become even less about sacrificing for the future than about a futurity already intractably mortgaged to or sold out for a still-precarious present: how to maneuver among seemingly non-negotiable vectors of hyper-exploitation that not only enjoin and profit from labor, but require life itself to be rented? As Graham lays bare the intricacies of this ruthless system, she puts on display the surplus exactions of (gendered) affective labor, but more so the affect and social judgment generated around each reticulation of an ever-complexifying debt network. What Graph finally portrays is not canny, street-smart manipulations of what exactly must be rendered – would-be debt-defying feats – but the very impossibility of being a “good” subject of debt, of navigating labyrinths designed to be so difficult to negotiate that the debtor, regardless of fidelity to dues, is dug continually deeper in arrears. Take, for instance, Graham’s appropriation text (outright expropriation of pre-fabricated language or sublet?), comprised of select search results for the phrase “is not easy” combined with those for the term “austerity.” Here the grotesquerie of the neoliberal suffocation of the welfare state posed as natural fact meets the sleazy, faux-sympathetic come-on of coping mechanisms for hire: Graham pinpoints and plays up the debt-service industry’s massaging rhetoric—“we’re here to help”—with its promise to understand rather than condemn the debtor who must pay by exposing herself if she is ever to get out of the hole, as it lures her to meet the class antagonism of debt redeemingly re-branded as life challenge. Graham’s reframing perfectly captchas the paradox of the creditor’s invocation of bygone civility in the very act of describing a most uncivil insistence: “You can write us a letter and we will stop contacting you.” If its inclusion of protest (“thousands of people in Lisbon protest austerity measures”) opens onto a possible opposition to working with austerity—indeed, of profiting from it—the piece also exemplifies the affective dynamics that overtax working-class virtues, preying upon vulnerability, an aversion to being beholden, and the willingness to pull the belt tighter, even as the debt economy works over labor only to extrude it. “In capitalist logics of askesis,” as Lauren Berlant observes, “the workers’ obligation is to be more rational than the system, and their recompense is to be held in a sense of pride at surviving the scene of their own attrition.” Or as Graham says: “Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that?” Another appropriation text, on “office automation,” reads as a counter-exemplar of actor network theory: the repeated imposition of the word “automation” in discourse cribbed from corporate ad copy serves to mystify precisely which tasks the technology will perform, as human causality continually slips logics in these triumphalist formulations. Such deskilling...

Suturing Working Class Subjectivities: Media Mobilizing Project and the Role of Media Building a Class-Based Social Movement

Due to the increasingly atomized, isolated nature of social life, as well as the apparent splintering of the working class under neoliberal capitalism, media serve a pivotal infrastructural function for generating the necessary commonality between the fractured sectors of the contemporary working class. This article ethnographically and textually examines how the media driven practices of the Philadelphia-based Media Mobilizing Project helps collectively suture fragmented groups of workers into a class formation that begins to resist and challenge the hegemony of neoliberal practices. As our detailed analysis of MMP’s 2007 to 2009 montage reels show, MMP videos serve the primary purpose of fostering class alliances not only through their viewing, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through their making. As such, we do not consider media in general and the MMP videos in particular as an endpoint unto themselves, but instead as catalysts for further organization building and the renewed suturing of the multiple components of what we understand as a contemporary urban working class. Through a host of old and new media platforms (radio, video, web) MMP works with different segments of the neoliberal working class, such as immigrants, urban youth, and low-wage workers, to create a class identity at the local and regional level.

Suturing Working Class Subjectivities: Media Mobilizing Project and the Role of Media Building a Class-Based Social Movement

Due to the increasingly atomized, isolated nature of social life, as well as the apparent splintering of the working class under neoliberal capitalism, media serve a pivotal infrastructural function for generating the necessary commonality between the fractured sectors of the contemporary working class. This article ethnographically and textually examines how the media driven practices of the Philadelphia-based Media Mobilizing Project helps collectively suture fragmented groups of workers into a class formation that begins to resist and challenge the hegemony of neoliberal practices. As our detailed analysis of MMP’s 2007 to 2009 montage reels show, MMP videos serve the primary purpose of fostering class alliances not only through their viewing, but also, and perhaps more importantly, through their making. As such, we do not consider media in general and the MMP videos in particular as an endpoint unto themselves, but instead as catalysts for further organization building and the renewed suturing of the multiple components of what we understand as a contemporary urban working class. Through a host of old and new media platforms (radio, video, web) MMP works with different segments of the neoliberal working class, such as immigrants, urban youth, and low-wage workers, to create a class identity at the local and regional level.

Breaking the Mold of Contemporary Working-Class Mexican Masculinity: The Rock Urbano Music of Tex Tex

Breaking the Mold of Contemporary Working-Class Mexican Masculinity: The Rock Urbano Music of Tex Tex

Uma sociologia da condição proletária contemporânea

The increase in company outsourcing over the last two decades has led to the development of a new type of worker on the margins of the productive system: the call centre operator. Responsible for a wide range of information services, the rapid expansion in call centres has stirred the interest of a number of researchers in different areas of knowledge. Analyzing the work of the call centre operator, the article looks to deepen our comprehension of the sea-change currently affecting today's working class. In contrast to what many forecasted some fifteen years ago, the information revolution has failed to dissolve the opposition between manual and mental work activities: instead, it has served as a key instrument for controlling and routinizing intellectual work. In turning to this theme, we explore some of the insights into the contemporary working class condition found in the inspirational study by Stephane Beaud and Michel Pialoux on the Peugeot car assembly plant in Sochaux-Montbeliard.

Trashing Identity Politics: Does It Really Get Us Back to Class?

Verity Burgmann creates an unnecessary and ahistorical distinction between the politics of class and that of the various identities through which the contemporary working class defines itself. Indeed, her vision of a self-conscious proletariat seems too male and too musty. Racial and gender identities have achieved a privileged status, compared to that of class, but this has less to do with the outlook of the left-wing academy than with the late twentieth-century transformation of law, politics, and social policy, both in the US and other multicultural nations.

Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars by Catherine Turner (review)

study of Pat Barker shows her 'persistenteffort to create a collective experience and consciousness'(p. 149). By setting the multi-voiced dialogic narratives(of, say, UnionStreet) againstthe unitaryand monologic accountsof the state(andagainst'the history of class struggleas surplusvalue and union men'), Barkerseeks to recover 'a gendered class memory' (p. I54). Kirk is motivated by a sense that the now conventional attention in literary studies -to gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality-has meant a neglect of the issue of class, for him (and,I think,for many of us) the most profound determinant of all. For his fluent use of theories that illuminateratherthan fix the texts, for his cogent but unobtrusivehistoricaland political interjectionsand, especially, for the subtlety of his readings -the seriousnesswith which he confronts the everyday experience of the contemporary working class -his work deserves to make an impact. Class should be at the heart, not at the margins, of literary as well as political analysis:its absence vitiates radical analysis. MANCHESTERMETROPOLITANUNIVERSITY ALF LOUVRE MarketingModernismBetweenthe Two World Wars. By CATHERINE TURNER.Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2003. xiii + 256 pp. $39.95, f28.50. ISBN:I-55849-376-x. CatherineTurner seeksto untangle modern literature'srelationshipwith its American readers in her Marketing Modernism Between theTwo WorldWars.By examining strategiesadopted by B. W. Huebsch, Alfred A. Knopf, Harcourt Brace, Charles Scribner's Sons, and Random House, Turner illustrates the manner in which modern workstook theirplace within a wider literarytraditionby defyingclassification as highbrow and reaching a broader audience. While readings of modernism that privilege its elitism have concentrated on its disdain for the public, Turner refutesthe argumentthat the movement was entirelyanti-commercial,pointing out that while authors may have been sceptical of consumer culture, they still actively courted an audience. Ultimately, however, evidence of the ways in which publishers disseminatedmodernismas a commodity can only speculateas to the real sentiment of their writers,even those who participatedwillinglyin these marketingschemes. Ben Huebsch maintained a connection with traditionalviews of publishing by eschewing trendy advertisingapproachesin the i9ios and I920s. By adopting texts from Sherwood Anderson,James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence that few other firms would bring forth, Huebsch chose to emphasize challenging ideas while avoiding discussion of his authors' personalities. He concentrated on niche marketing, targeting genteel readersby sometimes working with book clerkson an individual basis. While Alfred Knopf shared Huebsch's respect for art, he took advantage of changing tastes amongst readersin the United States. Hoping to develop a middlebrow market by building trust in the discernment of his imprint, Knopf initially concentrated on foreign authors in translation like Thomas Mann to target Americans' sense that good literature could provide stability in changing times. Alfred Harcourt's work in the I930s, on the other hand, reflected his desire to publish contemporary works by American authors, and he maintained that an educatedpublicwished to put theirlearningto use in reading'novelsof ideas'.With Gertrude Stein's TheAutobiography ofAliceB. Toklas,Harcourt convinced readersin study of Pat Barker shows her 'persistenteffort to create a collective experience and consciousness'(p. 149). By setting the multi-voiced dialogic narratives(of, say, UnionStreet) againstthe unitaryand monologic accountsof the state(andagainst'the history of class struggleas surplusvalue and union men'), Barkerseeks to recover 'a gendered class memory' (p. I54). Kirk is motivated by a sense that the now conventional attention in literary studies -to gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality-has meant a neglect of the issue of class, for him (and,I think,for many of us) the most profound determinant of all. For his fluent use of theories that illuminateratherthan fix the texts, for his cogent but unobtrusivehistoricaland political interjectionsand, especially, for the subtlety of his readings -the seriousnesswith which he confronts the everyday experience of the contemporary working class -his work deserves to make an impact. Class should be at the heart, not at the margins, of literary as well as political analysis:its absence vitiates radical analysis. MANCHESTERMETROPOLITANUNIVERSITY ALF LOUVRE MarketingModernismBetweenthe Two World Wars. By CATHERINE TURNER.Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 2003. xiii + 256 pp. $39.95, f28.50. ISBN:I-55849-376-x. CatherineTurner seeksto untangle modern literature'srelationshipwith its American readers in her Marketing Modernism Between theTwo WorldWars.By examining strategiesadopted by B. W. Huebsch, Alfred A...

KWU-werkersklasdramas in Afrikaans (ca. 1930 - ca. 1950)

GWU working class theatre in Afrikaans (ca. 1930 - ca. 1950)In 1984 Elsabé Brink drew attention to plays, prose and poetry written between 1930 and 1950 in Afrikaans by members of the Garment Workers’ Union (GWU). Scholars such as Stander and Willemse (1992), Van Niekerk (1996) and Van Wyk (1995, 1997) have also referred to GWU plays. Apart from these overviews, GWU plays as such have not yet received the attention they deserve. This article presents a revaluation, initially by providing an overview of their contents, followed by an examination of cultural, economic and political influences. It is argued that - retrospectively - the GWU plays reflected a unique cultural specificity from the framework established by Sitas (1986) for more contemporary working class theatre.