The working class form a majority in society. They are united as a class because workers have to sell their ability to work (their labour power) for a wage or salary to an employer. They are forced by economic circumstances to enter the labour market where they are exploited as a class in producing more social wealth than their income, what Marx called “surplus value” or “surplus labour time”. As a class, workers have the potential power to change society in a revolutionary way, from production for profit to production solely and directly to meet human need.
Workers have the ability to politically and democratically form themselves into socialist political parties, gain control of the machinery of government and replace capitalism with socialism. What prevents this from happening? One serious barrier preventing workers acting in their own class interest is that they are constantly being split and fragmented by defenders of the capitalist class into opposing groups; both nationally and within the country itself.
Divide and rule is not new. The Latin phrase “divide et impera” is as old as politics and war. The Romans were adept at divide and rule. Julius Caesar successfully applied it to conquer Gaul. The British used the policy of divide and rule in India in the 19th and early 20th centuries when they created a rift between the Hindus and Muslims and between lower and upper castes. The policy of divide and rule still did not stop the Roman Empire collapsing nor prevent the British being forced to leave India in 1947.
During war, government propaganda often successfully pits workers from one country against workers from another country. However, workers have no interest in capitalism’s wars. Workers do not own the means of production and distribution. Issues such as disputes over trade routes, spheres of strategic interest, land and resources are of no interest to the working class. There is one world working class with workers in Russia, for example, having the same interest as workers in Ukraine and workers in Israel having the same class interest as workers in the occupied regions of Palestine. One global class and one global class enemy. Nevertheless, in times of war, governments constantly depict other workers as “the enemy” to be killed and destroyed.
Divide and rule splits the working class into fragments and they misleadingly see other workers as the problem rather than capitalism and the profit system. Low wages, unemployment, poor housing and health care are all mistakenly seen as the fault of other workers but not capitalism: the private ownership of the means of production and distribution to the exclusion of the rest of society. Workers misleadingly believe that if migrants were stopped coming to the UK, wages would rise and there would be no scarcity of housing.
This is not the case. Workers are paid as little as employers can get away with and the reason why workers cannot get decent housing to meet their needs is because it is just too expensive. With or without migrants, workers would still be in the same subservient class position. Workers are in poverty because of capitalism not because of other workers.
Who is to Blame?
To divide the worker class, a minority group is identified, demonised by politicians and the media and then presented as a threat to all that is decent and wholesome. In the mid-1970s, Margaret Thatcher’s right-hand man, Keith Joseph, warned that the cycle of social deprivation was the result of sexual promiscuity and over breeding of sections of the working class. Single parent mothers on council housing estates were, according to Joseph, threatening “our human stock”. He conveniently changed the focus of attention from capitalism as the cause of social deprivation to groups within the working class who were unable to defend themselves.
We are reminded that in the 19th century the working class were divided into ”the deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”. Vagrancy laws set up the dichotomy between the “deserving and undeserving poor”. The undeserving poor became increasingly associated with society’s social decay – the “Residuum” who became prey to the pseudo-science of eugenics from which social programmes of sterilisation were considered. The Labour Party Fabians, Shaw, H. G. Wells and the Webbs were ardent eugenicists as was Keynes and Beveridge (See G. R. Searle “The Quest for National Efficiency” 1971).
Margaret Thatcher played on fears of immigration to help win the 1979 election by remarking about British people fearing they might be “rather swamped by people of a different culture”. She was after the National Front vote and she succeeded in getting it. The Defence Secretary Michael Fallon used a similar slur against immigrants in October 2014. All part of the politician’s racist arsenal to divide and rule.
Enoch Powell successfully divided the working class during the late 1960s. In his so-called “rivers of blood”, speech in Birmingham in 1968, he quoted Virgil’s Aeneid: “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the river Tiber foaming with much blood’.” His image was future “race wars”; violence between black and white members of the working class leading to bloodshed and death.
Shortly afterwards, thousands of Dockers and meat packers marched and took strike action in support of Powell’s xenophobic views. Capitalism, the cause of the poverty facing the working class, was moved onto other workers. Boris Johnson, a student of Powell, when Prime minister, pushed white English ethno-nationalism in the North of England to gain votes that were formerly going to Farage’s UKIP.
Since the 1960s the targets for those wanting to split the working class has been immigrants, gays, trade unionists, people with a disability, those living in inner-city council estates, the unemployed and youth sub-culture. In the 1980’s Margaret Thatcher looked to striking miners as “the enemy within”. These striking miners were also condemned by the Labour leader Neil Kinnock. New Labour also supported attacks on single parents when they cut lone parent benefits in the early days of the Blair government. Labour, too, carried on Tory policies of demonising migrants. Remember labour’s anti-immigrant branded mug with its promise “Controls on immigration”.
Of course, this is not new. At the turn of the Twentieth Century it was the Jews from Eastern Europe. Then it was workers from the Caribbean in the 1950s, then Refugees from Kenya and Uganda in the 1970s and then “trade union barons” holding the country to ransom in the late 1970s who had to be disciplined with anti-trade union legislation. And the universities and politicians divide the working class into “working class” and “middle class” ignoring the fact that all workers who receive a wage or salary are members of the same class. The so-called “middle-class” (architects, doctors, university lecturers) make up 15% of the working class.
More recently the young have been encouraged to blame their inability to get housing on the elderly who are reported to live such fantastic lives on the state pensions. David Willets, the former universities Minister, contributed to this false division in his book The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give It Back, in 2010 and up-dated it in 2020. The “enemy” now were the “baby boomers”, an alleged pampered section of the working class who, according to Willets, were ruining their children’s future. Yet, pensioner poverty is at an all time high. The Centre for Ageing Better’s annual report, published on 17 March, finds that there were 200,000 more poor pensioners in 2021. Nothing was said about capitalism by David Willets. And he was unsurprisingly quiet on the vast wealth and privilege of the capitalist class.
Beyond the Fragments
Is the working class so fragmented that it would rather tear itself apart rather than understand that capitalism, the profit system, is the cause of their social and economic problems not other workers? Politicians and the media seemingly find it very easy to divide and rule. Capitalism and the capitalist class get off scot-free.
Are the cynics right? Is there no hope? Can the working class be brought together? It is true that the working class are pitted against each other the minute they go to school in preparation for the jobs market. As adults, workers compete against each other for resources and jobs. This competition affects all areas of their lives.
Marx commented on the problem of competition which fragments the working class against itself:
“Competition separates individuals from one another, not only the bourgeois, but still more the workers, in spite of the fact that it brings them together. Hence it is a long time before these individuals can unite…Hence every organized power standing over these isolated individuals, who live in conditions daily reproducing this isolation, can only be overcome after long struggles. To demand the opposite would be tantamount to demanding that competition should not exist in this definite epoch of history, or that the individuals should banish from their minds conditions over which in their isolation they have no control.” .
(German Ideology)
Marx believed that despite competition and class division, workers can unite and this unification came out of the dynamics of the class struggle. In the Communist Manifesto he sketched out the development of the working class from an incoherent mass to one organising into trade unions and then political parties.
Conditions of capitalism have the potential for class solidarity and unity. Struggling for pay and better working conditions unites all workers, so does the necessity for joining trade unions to further class interests. And not all workers, for example, see migrants as “the enemy” as demagogues like Nigel Farage hoped for when he criticised the RNLI as a “migrant taxi service” for saving migrants. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution raised more than £200,000 in a single day after defending its work rescuing migrants at risk of drowning in the Channel, while volunteering inquiries almost quadrupled. (Guardian 21/7/21).
Marx distinguished between what he called a “class in itself” and a “class for itself.” Workers first become conscious of sharing common interests around pay and working conditions (a class “in itself”) and eventually develop an awareness as a class opposed to employers and seeing the necessity to replace capitalism with socialism (a class “for itself”).
Most of the time, workers experience life in isolation from other workers. The economic and political narrative of their isolated lives is framed by the media; particularly the newspapers and television who continually demonise other workers. As individuals, they are much more likely to accept the ruling ideas of society, to see others as the problem not capitalism as a debilitating social system to be changed in a revolutionary way. Even in the face of a sea of capitalist propaganda dividing the working class against itself, workers; male and female, black and white, work together for a common purpose in trade union organisations and socialist political parties. There is class solidarity, weak as it currently is.
Workers, despite the capitalist propaganda, have understood that the social system has to be changed and can be changed once there is a majority of socialists in society.
In this revolutionary process “divide and rule” loses its political power. Workers have become socialists and workers will become socialists because capitalism, as Marx noted, “creates its own grave diggers”. Capitalism can never resolve the problems facing the working class. It can never meet the needs of all society. Capitalism and the contradictions of capitalism cause into existence socialist ideas, socialists and a socialist revolutionary force. Capitalism is a “fetter on production” generating economic crises and the class struggle.
Nevertheless, there is only so much socialists can do. We can warn and we can persuade but we cannot lead. The abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism have to be the work of the working class itself. Yet as socialists we have to remain positive and optimistic even in these dark and depressing times. As Bob Marley sang: “Don’t give up the fight: Never give up the fight”.
What of the political terrain over which the working class lay fragmented and fighting against each other. We can look no further than the optimism of Erin Quinn in Channel Four’s “Derry Girls”:
“If our dreams get broken into pieces, we have to make a new future from the pieces”.
Derry Girls
