Probing the 21st century [4]

Belonging to more than one class

By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed

If the 20th century was to be encapsulated in one concise formula, it could be described as the "century of ideology", in which Marxism stands out as the most prominent. The central idea on which Marxism is based is class struggle. In the name of class struggle, the world was divided throughout most of the 20th century into two antagonistic camps, world capitalism versus world socialism: the latter was assumed to be a preliminary stage in the march forward towards a future classless communist society.

But the socialist camp collapsed, and with it the so-called bipolar world order. In the name of "globalism", the world became subjected to one unique frame of reference, namely, the values of contemporary capitalism. An American scholar, Francis Fukuyama, called this "the end of History". Actually, this motto was assumed to mean the end of class struggle. To what extent can this assumption be regarded as true?

Before going into the validity of the question, it might be worth looking into a phenomenon that can be described as multiplicity of class affiliation, that is, the state of belonging to more than one class simultaneously. This phenomenon can be invoked by some to argue that class struggle, which Marx described as "the engine of history", is no longer valid. By definition, class struggle presupposes that society will become more and more sharply polarised between two dominant classes whose fundamental antagonism determines the march of events. If belonging to more than one class becomes a widespread phenomenon, social polarisation is blurred and class struggle downgraded. It is no longer the engine of history.

Actually, Marx himself acknowledged that individuals in given societies can eventually acquire more than one class identity at the same time. He mentioned the case of aristocrats in feudal societies who espoused the cause of the bourgeoisie: the case of Mirabeau, for example, during the French Revolution. In the case of socialist revolutions, groups of bourgeois intellectuals have passed over to the ranks of the proletariat.

As social mobility increases, this type of class mobility also increases. This is especially true in our time, marked as it is by the shrinking of the planet and the growing interdependence and interpenetration of societies.

The blurring of social polarisation is evident in a number of cases, such as workers who are not only workers but also shareholders, whether in the company by which they are employed or in any other, and who, in their capacity as shareholders, benefit from the capitalist economy. Initially developed in America many years ago in the aim of reducing the intensity of class struggle, these forms of so-called "popular capitalism" have today become a feature of the global economy. The other side of the coin is to encourage the existence of a private (i.e. capitalist) sector in socialist economies.

With the advance in technology and the robotisation of production processes, the white-collar job market has expanded at the expense of blue-collar work. The information revolution has done much in bringing about this change, in creating a working class whose work addresses the mind rather than the muscles. As the working class becomes more educated and sophisticated, it aspires to acquire many of the trappings of petty bourgeois and middle class life. A worker in Japan can be better off than a capitalist in an underdeveloped country. Such a situation is hard to reconcile with the call with which Marx concluded the Communist Manifesto 150 years ago: "Workers of all countries, unit!". Because of differences in the degree of societal development, discrepancies between standards of living within the international working class can be more pronounced than differences with other classes. As information concerning the Other is generalised and distances between societies reduced, contrasts become more pronounced. In a way, our shrinking planet is acquiring the Einsteinian paradox of exhibiting wider distances in a smaller room!

Belonging to more than one class is no longer the exception; it is becoming the rule. Because the same individual can simultaneously represent a variety of discordant interests, conflict tends to become internalised within the citizen himself. Struggle thus moves from the field of class struggle to the field of psychological, even mental and nervous, strains and stresses, to a conflict between a variety of class identities in one individual. This type of conflict might appear as not expressing class struggle, but rather, conflicts of a cultural or civilisational nature, what another American scholar, Samuel Huntington, attributed to a "clash of civilisations". This last type of conflict should not be regarded as a negation of class struggle, but rather as a perverted form of that struggle in a post-modern world where distinctions between classes become blurred and which, because of the complexity of modern life, are much more ambivalent.

Because a given mechanism is blurred by the fact that it is operating in a more complex environment, the conclusion to draw is not to claim that the mechanism itself is no longer valid. In the light of present developments, where the future can hardly be linear, and it is not easy to predict its course with any degree of accuracy, it is all the more pertinent to resist the temptation of throwing overboard conceptual tools that are still of paramount importance.