Joshua Lew McDermott asserts that two primary myths about the working class, that of the industrialized and the formalized proletariat, are misconceptual elements seriously undermining the socialist movement today.
Grayson Perry, Home Worker and Key Worker Staffordshire Figures (2021)
In all epochs of history there have been the laboring classes, those who produce the goods necessary for a society to reproduce, and the ruling classes, those who expropriate the goods produced by the laboring classes. In the capitalist epoch, the ruling class is the capitalist class, i.e., the owners of society’s properties and businesses. The laboring class is the working-class, i.e., those who are divorced from the means of production and who thus must sell their labor to survive.
Recognizing the inherently exploitative nature of the worker/capitalist relationship and overcoming this central class division are at the heart of all socialist projects. Yet, the working-class/ruling class divide is infinitely complex; it is always iterated in conjunction with geopolitical, imperialist, ethnic, racial, gendered, and intraclass inequalities. It is always defined by dynamic changes in labor regimes, the employment relationship, and social reproduction among the working class. Nevertheless, one could argue that the basic conceptual insight that a fundamental class division exists at the root of capitalist society remains the defining insight and litmus test of all socialists.
The central task of socialist thought, then, has always been to identify and conceptualize the specific historical and social circumstances through which the fundamental capitalist class division manifests and reproduces at any given time and place. Socialist thought, if it is to be effective, must be based on empirical, evolving insights into the actually existing conditions of capitalist society. The central task of socialist actions has always been to act upon these insights to effectively organize the working-classes in creating a new, classless society.
But socialist thought, like all systems of thought, is not immune from stagnation, dogma, empirical error, distortions, and bias. The two primary distorting myths of socialist thought in the twenty-first century include: first, the privileging of formalized workers engaged in (traditionally conceived) areas of structural significance in the class struggle (i.e., the industrialized proletariat myth), and second, the assumption that formalized wage-labor is the normal form of labor undertaken by the working class in capitalist societies (i.e., the formalized proletariat myth). Both myths entail the erasure of the reality of capitalism throughout the Global South and among the poorest segments of the working-class the world over; they also imply colonial, gendered, and racialized notions of who is a worker and who is not.
Indeed, for many socialist thinkers and practitioners, conceptions of “the working class” have remained stubbornly outdated and beholden to analyses stemming from the era of classic industrial capitalism. These conceptions, even if unconsciously, are Euro- and North-centric. In reality, a majority of the world’s workers today, and throughout capitalist history, work informal jobs. According to the International Labor Organization, 60% of the world’s workers are informal, and informal workers produce one third of the global GDP.1
Informal labor can be defined as income-producing labor undertaken as part of the capitalist mode of production without enforced and/or codified regulations/protections by a state actor. Informal workers lack any recourse to the state in terms of a minimum wage, workplace safety, or social welfare. Informal workers are more likely to be impoverished and mistreated than their formal worker counterparts.2
Indeed, perhaps the single greatest misunderstanding about the working-class in capitalism today, and throughout history, is the assumption that regular, regulated (i.e., formal) wage work, often in heavy industries, is the normal, usual form of the employment relationship and the defining form of labor undertaken by the working-class under capitalism. From the misuse and myriad definitions of the usually derogatory term “lumpen,” to the analytically lazy and often ahistorical application of concepts such as “the precariat,” “the reserve army of labor,” or “surplus humanity,” there remains a stubborn assumption among leftists which identifies those who hold formal jobs as working-class and those who survive in the informal economy as a non-class “subaltern”; as lumpen populations or, at the very least, as marginal or powerless subsets of the working-class.
The Industrialized Proletariat Myth
It has become almost a truism that many Marxists and socialists primarily locate working-class power with specific industrial (i.e. factory work) and logistical (i.e. teamsters, dock workers, etc.) industries, a notion further entrenched by the ascendence of analytical Marxism among Marxist scholars in the U.S. and UK since the 1980s.3 What’s more – there remains in the socialist movement a tendency, whether latent or explicit, of recognizing industrial labor as the defining form of labor in capitalist society, and thus industrial workers as the working class par excellence.
Historically, in the Global East and South, these assumptions have been contested. From Lenin to the Black Panthers, to Che Guevara and Amilcar Cabral, the idea that the nature of labor/capital relationships is static or that the insights of Marx´s analysis of Western Europe during the ascendance of industrial capitalism in the 19th century are universally applicable has been challenged. These challenges have been fundamental to the success of actually existing socialist projects throughout history.
There has also recently emerged in the US over the last few decades much scholarship and activism also challenging these assumptions. For instance: the modern labor movement in the US, especially its most radical elements, is driven largely by workers in the public and service sectors, many of whom are women, and many of whom are also Black or Latino, and all of whom would, traditionally, be recognized as holding little structural power or of being “unproductive” workers (or even lumpenproletariat in the most dogmatically orthodox Marxist terms).
Yet despite the growing legacy of practical, empirical, and theoretical challenges to the privileging of industrial and formalized workers in the struggle against capital, there remains some strands of contemporary Marxist thought that have been slow to acknowledge that our world has changed and is ever-changing. Marxists must now, more than ever, accept the ever-present need to reevaluate the unique dynamics of capitalism in the 21st century, and the specificity of capital accumulation across complex and varied regions, in order to understand what is to be done today.
It is not out of order to argue that the rise of global labor arbitrage and the attendant deindustrialization and weakening of the labor movement throughout the global North since the 1970s remains nothing short of an existential crisis for classic socialist theory and praxis. If the only hope for the socialist revolution lies in a structurally powerful industrial class, what hope remains in the wake of deindustrialization and the shift towards post-industrial service economies in today’s late Neoliberal era? And, further, what of the hundreds of millions of workers across the Global South, especially in Africa, who have never worked in the industrial sector? Are they merely irrelevant to the struggle for socialism beyond, perhaps, vaguely driving down global wages by merely existing?
That the majority of workers, both in the U.S. and abroad, are not engaged in industrial work is an empirical reality that cannot be ignored. What’s more, the historical failure of the factoried, industrial working classes of Western Europe to achieve the predicted revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries is further evidence of the flawed assumptions of class-consciousness and workers’ power that have long informed socialist thought, especially in the West. The idea that class-consciousness and workers’ power solely emanate from the industrial shop floor is empirically incorrect.
Still, these assumptions about who comprises the working class, who can become radicalized, and who has the power to foment revolution remain stubborn in many corners of the global socialist movement today. Just as great socialist thinkers of the twentieth century challenged traditional notions of the nature of the revolutionary class in their turn to the peasantry, so too must the socialists of today be willing to let our theory and practice boldly reflect the existing conditions of the capitalist system and the working class today.
The Formalized Proletariat Myth
The other most pernicious and pervasive myth in socialist thought today is the assumption that the working relationship and work under capitalism has always been largely defined by formal and regular work relations and conditions. The formalized proletariat myth is two-fold: first, there is an assumption that informal workers are all self-employed petty producers and vendors. This is not the case. It is estimated that 15.7% of all the world’s permanent full-time employees are informal workers. For part-time employees, temporary employees, and part-time temporary employees, the rate of informality is 44%, 56.7%, and 64.4% respectively.4 Even these numbers are likely underestimated.
These figures amount to billions of the world’s employees being informal. In other words, the norm historically and today is a working class that has always been struggling to survive in conditions of precarity, irregular employment, and, yes, informality. In fact, many of the major labor struggles of the past two centuries have been precisely to achieve formal recognition for workers from the state and from employers and, thus, to achieve standing and recourse when rights are violated.
From farm workers to the Black labor movement, to contract miners and steelworkers, the struggle for formality has always been part of the broader socialist struggle to unite the working class and to overthrow capitalism. To equate informal workers with a reactionary lumpen or with a marginalized, powerless underclass of surplus workers is to assume that the most radical and effective drivers of the historical labor movement were themselves not workers!
The second aspect of the formality myth is the idea that those informal workers who are self-employed as petty producers and vendors (i.e. own-account workers) are somehow insulated from, and exterior to, capitalist dynamics and relations and, therefore, are not (significant) members of the global working class.
On the contrary, the own-account workers of the world are not divorced from, marginal to, powerless to change, or excluded from the capitalist system. In reality, own-account workers around the world are integrated within capitalist value-chains and function either/or largely to produce profit for capitalists or to enable social reproduction of the working class. Most street vendors, for instance, can be understood as sales workers hawking imported goods produced by corporate entities and sold to them by powerful wholesalers. Ultimately, these workers realize profit for bourgeois and petit bourgeois producers and merchants.
Other own-account workers play the essential function of providing cheap goods and services necessary for the social reproduction of the masses in the Global South. The millions of women and children who sell food from their homes or on the street at extremely small profit margins are just as essential to the reproduction of the working class as the women (and usually they are one and the same) who have for centuries engaged in the unpaid care-work necessary to sustain their families. Other own-account workers work directly in the resource extraction industry, providing the hyper-exploited labor necessary for the cheap extraction of resources by middle- and high-income countries. Though they may lack an employer in the traditional sense, the middlemen and corporations who ultimately buy the agricultural goods, timber, fish, diamonds, etc. produced by these “self-employed” informal workers function, in reality, as employers engaged in hyper-exploitation.
Recognizing the Global Working Class and its Capabilities Today
The immense power of informal workers has perhaps never been more apparent than in the world-shaking Arab Spring revolutions of the 2010s. The revolutions were sparked by the self-immolation of an informal worker, the street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi. The bulk of the millions who took to the streets across the region following his death were themselves largely informal workers.
Although the Arab Spring revolutions resulted ultimately in failure and reaction, they demonstrated the mass power of the world’s informal workers and challenged the assumptions held by those who emphasize trade unionism and formal workers in their conceptions of worker power in the revolutionary struggle.
Perhaps the greatest contributing factor to the failure of the revolutions to result in a betterment of material conditions for those informal workers was precisely the fact that they were not organized and disciplined along class lines. Marxists and socialist organizations have declined in number and significance in the Middle East for decades; this being the result of an explicit strategy undertaken by the CIA, Mossad, and other imperial intelligence apparatuses to destroy the secular, Marxist left in the Middle East. Thus, the failure of the Arab Spring Revolutions is, in part, a legacy of the onslaught of imperialism and liberalism against the global left in the Neoliberal era.
But the left itself is not blameless in Arab Spring failures – for too long, Marxists and socialists the world over have failed to recognize, conceptualize, and organize informal workers simply because they lack the formal and industrial jobs that have historically been associated with the revolutionary socialist movement. If a broad, inclusive socialist organization had existed in the region and across the countries that experienced upheaval, the revolutions may very well have ended differently for the masses.
Again, the questions of industrialization and formality are not only significant for the Global South. In the global North, deindustrialization is one element which challenges traditional socialist notions of the working class. Another element is the rise of tech industry “innovations” which classify workers as independent contractors rather than employees, such as Uber and DoorDash. These innovations are not novel, however, nor do they reflect the creation of some new class deemed by some as “the precariat.” Instead, the contemporary rise of contracted and gig-work is part of the long history of capitalism, both in North and South, wherein capital has sought to eschew responsibility for paying workers and/or providing for the social reproduction of the working class. The bulk of the working class, especially its most maligned segments, have always experienced precarity.
The anomaly of capitalism is not today’s precariousness among workers, but the brief period of stability experienced during the Fordist, Keynesian Post-War period in the West. Neither was the “Golden Age of Capitalism,” as some have called it, itself a testament to the manageability of capitalism for the progress and betterment of all. Instead, the economic boom of the Post-War years was only made possible by the immense investment opportunities that arose due to the unimaginable destruction unleashed across Europe and the integration of the globe into a system of U.S. dominated capitalist hegemony.
Additionally, just as in the classic colonial era, the affluence of Europe and North America in the Golden Age period depended upon the deprivation and underdevelopment of the rest of the planet: a fundamental inequality that is manifest in the brutal machinations of the CIA across Latin America, Asia, and Africa during the 1950s and 60s against any attempts by socialist and nationalist movements to develop independently of the U.S. system.
Thus, the collapse of the Keynesian system and the relatively high standards of living and low domestic inequality associated with the welfare state model in the West was the natural result of the normalization of capitalist dynamics across the globe. The welfare model cannot save us today; neither can a return to the Fordist compromise between capital and labor: the power of capital is too globally diffuse, too entrenched, and too immune from the pressures of increasingly feckless liberal democracies across the world to compromise with labor, even in the Western democracies. The rise of neo-fascism and reactionary populism across the globe is testament to this fact.
The future remains one of pauperization, casualization, and informality for the mass of workers, an increasingly precarious yet compliant middling-class life for the professional managerial classes, and immense power and opulence for the ruling elite. More than ever, the possibilities of reform seem futile. To overlook, write off, or to actively denigrate informal workers is to undermine the bulk of the revolutionary class actors of whom a democratic, humane future depends upon.
Indeed, to narrowly confine conceptions of labor power, class consciousness, and solidarity to a few small segments of the global work force (often the most privileged segments at that) is to both ignore the history of the labor struggle and successful revolutionary movements, but also to doom the socialist movement of the twenty-first century to irrelevance, pessimism, and hopelessness. The working class is not confined to the factory; nor are the world’s workers engaged in formal, regular employment. This fact should not make us despair or doubt the hope for revolutionary change. It should merely embolden us to correctly analyze and effectively organize the world we live in.
- ILO (International Labour Organization). Women and Men in the Informal Economy: A Statistical Picture. 3rd ed. (Geneva: International Labour Office. 2018).
- Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) “Links with Poverty” (2023). https://www.wiego.org/informal-economy/poverty-growth-linkages/links-poverty
- Erik Olin Wright Working-Class Power, Capitalist-Class Interests, and Class Compromise. 2000 (American Journal of Sociology 105, 4: 957–100).
- ILO (2018) 60.