Tessa Mayes
posted 4 December 2007

The answer to the title of a debate at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) ‘Is there a new global working class’ is ‘yes.’ So you can stop reading now!

Actually I lied. The speakers at this debate all agreed that there is a new global working class in terms of rising percentage of the population and occupation. However, they disagreed as to the details, the causes of this rise, whether the new class expressed itself politically and what the future holds.

Robyn Meredith (foreign correspondent at Forbes magazine and author of The Elephant and the Dragon) focused on the economic side of the issue, explaining how vast Chinese exports were altering job prospects for workers around the world. Some workers (especially middle class workers in the US) would lose their jobs, but globalisation also ‘lifted people out of poverty.’ According to the Progress Policy Institute, the number of global workers (defined according to criteria such as workers making goods for export and those who migrated for work) has tripled from 225m in 1980 to 900m in 2005.

For Meredith, the Chinese working class were not empowered but they were better off than 25 years ago: ‘democracy doesn’t necessarily follow capitalism.’ Workers, she said, were not there politically, with the exception Venezuela under the leadership of Hugo Chavez. She pointed out that the higher paid sections of the working class in the US frequently vote republican. She pointed out that in India the poor vote but in the UK, it’s the middle class who vote. And, that perhaps in China the working class would become more politically active as they sought property rights.

Daniel Ben-Ami (editor of Fund Strategy and author of Cowardly Capitalism) answered the debate question with ‘yes and no.’ Yes, there was a new working class in objective, structural terms. Those living in China and India are becoming less tied to the land. They can sell their labour power and do so in vast numbers, in cities all over the world. He cautioned, however, that despite the rapid economic development of these two countries there was still ‘a long way to go.’ For example, income per head in China is still only 10% of that in the USA. The populations of China and India were still more rural than urban (only 43% of Chinese and 29% of Indians are urban). Nevertheless, those that make up the new, global working class number in millions, and they’re growing.

So why the ‘no’? Ben-Ami pointed out that the working class had no major political expression on the world stage. He explained that there was an unhealthy strand of thinking on the left that the working class by their nature will be politically conscious. But that in the current political climate of ‘diminished expectations’, it is not possible to look to the working class as a force for change. Environmentalism fosters the conservative idea that man should accept nature and restrain his activities, rather than rise up and control nature for his own ends.

Jonathan Fenby (former editor of the Observer and South China Morning Post and author of the forthcoming Penguin History of Modern China) accepted that the numbers of industrial workers in China were growing but also said ‘no’, the working class didn’t have much class consciousness. To illustrate this, he recounted the speech by Hu Jintao, the present general secretary and leader of the Communist Part of China (CPC), who called on the 73 million members of the Party and the Chinese people to hold high the ‘great banner of socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ as they strive to build ‘a moderately prosperous society in all respects’ (as opposed to a very prosperous one presumably). He cited the fact that the working class membership of the Party was declining from 18% of members in 1978 to 11% in 2006. Fenby described how many Chinese manufacturing workers are migrants within the country, with few rights in a rigid registration system. There is only one trade union in China, and it works closely with management.

Fenby disagreed with Ben-Ami on environmentalism, explaining that China’s cement industry is the most polluting in the world, and suggesting that environmental issues needed to be addressed on behalf of the working class rather than dismissed. Fenby also disputed that there was an easy distinction to draw between urbanites and rural peasants. In China, he explained, the numbers of those living in villages but working in Town Village Enterprises is as much as the US labour force. Fenby concluded by saying that China was the country in the world that spearheaded capitalism the most, and asked the question, ‘will China give capitalism a bad name?’

Nigel Harris (Emeritus Professor of the Economics of the City, University College London and author of The Return of Cosmopolitan Capital - Globalisation, The State and War), offered some historical reminders that Hegel and Marx had distinguished between a working class in itself and one that was for itself. He said the Chinese working class was the oldest in the world – they proceeded the development of the European working class by 1000 years. Harris said the question was not, was there a new working class, but more, what explained the shrinkage of the Chinese working class?

Harris explained that the withering of the Chinese working class was partly explained by the decline of the Chinese Communist Party which affected working class consciousness. He reminded the audience of the way that the Party had not been able to support the mass strikes by the working class after the first world war. Although the working class were a ‘rich sociological force’, Harris concluded that expressions of working class consciousness such as mass strikes ‘ain’t going to happen again.’ Unlike Ben-Ami who stressed the need to defeat non-humanistic, conservative ideas, Harris was pessimistic about the future of class struggle, seeing the barriers to it as more structural and fixed.

Why? For Harris, the working class which expressed itself politically a hundred years ago in China was the product of particular economic conditions. These types of workers ‘have gone’ from China and India he said. Instead, globalisation will map out the future, especially since Marxism and class identity in politics had disappeared. Now the working class were ‘liberated’ from the material world because of globalisation, and lived in a less stable, fast paced and every changing world. Working conditions have changed. For instance there is no concentration of the working class with group leverage in a singular workplace, he explained. Globalisation undermined national entitites because production was transational. Class was also created in relation to power such as fighting a state, said Harris, adding that ‘globalisation was undermining the state….There is no concentration of power to fight.’

Two questions from the floor pointed out that the state is changing its form but not necessarily its force against the working class. This was particularly apparent in immigration law, with one audience member calling for a ‘true globalisation of labour’, the only form of globalisation that wasn’t free to move. Yet ultimately, for Harris, although the state still exists and tries to ‘recapture its national patch, globalisation is more powerful.’ Meredith also added to the debate, saying that these days people don’t need to migrate so much because through outsourcing they can work for foreign countries at home, as many Indian workers effectively do.

Guy de Jonquières (a former FT Asia columnist and commentator) disagreed with Harris that the state’s demise was just inevitable and argued for a stronger state to create justice and social services in an era of globalisation. He explained that there were several changes that affected the working class: 1) technological change, 2) the accelerating liberalisation of capital, goods and services, 3) the commoditisation of jobs done by machines and 4) the premium on knowledge and skills. He said this had led to various changes such as low unemployment in the US combined with low incomes, and that wage stagnation happened long before the rise of China and India last century.

Like Ben-Ami, Jonquieres agreed that China’s economic strength was over-played. He used the example of manufacturing output – China only contributes 12% of the world’s output, the US contributes 20% and it’s output rates over time are relatively stable and in Eastern Europe, share of world manufacturing output rose higher between 2000-6 than China. He said India has a skills shortage and also a job shortage, where PhD students find themselves doing low-skilled work. He said a recent report showed that only 10% of Chinese engineering students were equipped to work in a multi-national company involving educational skills as well as team-building skills and appreciation of a big, company structure.

There’s relatively little controversy over how to describe the new global working class in structural terms. But how a working class becomes or whether it will become ‘for itself’ is a contestable issue, and one that calls for more debate.

Tessa Mayes is a journalist and author.
email: info@tessamayes.co.uk