Class and oppression

The left is deeply divided about the relationship between class and oppression. rs21 member Ian Allinson argues that not only does class reductionism prevent socialists learning from and working in movements against oppression, but that misunderstandings of terms such as oppression, exploitation and power disarm the left in the face of our enemies.

The word oppression is generally used on the left to describe the situation of people who face discrimination such as women, racialised people, disabled people, LGBTQ+ people, or those in countries dominated by imperialist powers. But it also has the broader meaning of being subject to domination, the exercise of power or unjust treatment. To put it more plainly, it is about being under the thumb of others. All waged workers are oppressed – we are subject to the domination and rule of our employers.

Exploitation at work

When most people talk about the exploitation of workers, they generally have in mind some particularly extreme or abusive scenario. Marx, on the other hand, uses the term more in the way we might talk about exploitation of natural resources – making use of something for your own benefit, rather than as a moral judgement. More specifically, Marx sees exploitation as about the extraction of surplus value in a class society. In a capitalist society, this is exploitation of workers by employers. In this sense, not all workers are exploited. Only some are involved in the production of commodities for sale and the production of surplus value. For example, an NHS nurse is a worker, in a wage-labour relationship, but their work does not produce a commodity for their employer to sell, so they don’t produce surplus value. Even within a capitalist enterprise, not all workers are engaged in work which produces surplus value – such as workers in accounts, payroll or PR departments, or those in sales and many transport jobs that are needed for the employer to ‘realise’ the surplus value by turning it into money. Similarly, a cleaner directly employed by a rich family is a worker, but not producing a commodity for their boss to sell. If they did the same job but employed by a cleaning company, however, they would be producing surplus value. For Marxists, whether or not a worker is exploited – whether they are ‘productive’ or ‘unproductive’ of surplus value – is not a moral judgement or a comment on the usefulness of their job. It is a category for understanding the economic dynamics of capitalism. Nonetheless, it’s not unreasonable to refer to workers collectively being exploited by capitalists.

Marx’s ‘labour theory of value’ explains that the exchange value of a commodity is the quantity of labour that is socially necessary to produce it, given the state of technology, machinery etc. in a particular society. Labour power, our capacity to work, is a commodity produced and maintained in a process called social reproduction. The exchange value of labour power (wages) reflects the cost of everything needed to ensure a worker, and the next generation to replace them, is ready to work, through childcare, education, healthcare, housing, rest, recuperation etc. This value of labour power is not fixed – it is the product of struggle over the standard of life that workers will accept and the extent to which social reproduction is supported by unpaid labour (usually by women). It varies from place to place, time to time, and even between workers at different levels of the job hierarchy. What makes labour power a unique commodity is that we can be put to work for more hours than it takes us to produce the value of our labour power. This difference between the time we take to cover our wages and the hours we actually work is the source of surplus value and profits.

In previous class societies, such as slavery or feudalism, exploitation was transparent. Slaves knew they were producing for their masters, not themselves, and that the food and shelter they received represented only a portion of the wealth they produced. Serfs knew that they either had to work on the lord or priest’s land for part of their week, or to hand over a share of what they produced. In capitalism, exploitation is less transparent. We sell the only commodity we own – our labour power, our capacity to work. There is no visible difference between when we are working to cover our own wages or producing surplus value. Many workers are unaware how their unpaid work produces their employer’s wealth – but nearly all are aware of their oppression: that they are under the thumb of their employer, whether that thumb is pressing down lightly or heavily.

Workers are oppressed, some are exploited

Having set out how exploitation and oppression apply to workers, it is clear why the common claim that ‘exploitation unites, oppression divides’ is nonsense. It is actually oppression that is the shared experience of workers, not exploitation. Marx talked about the oppression of workers as freely as about their exploitation.

Capitalists learned when their system was young that they need enough workers who are healthy, educated and socialised to be compliant. That’s why our struggles aren’t the only pressures for them to ensure adequate education, healthcare, housing and so on – but their preference would be to provide them only where it helps the labour supply. That’s an important factor in attempts to cut provision for people whose disabilities make them unlikely to be profitably exploited. It also explains the pressure to restrict education for working class people in preparation for wage labour, which means restricting the curriculum, curtailing adult education and using fees to pressure students to consider the economic return on a course rather than studying what interests them.

It is important to recognise that social reproduction includes the provision of a compliant workforce. This shapes the education system, but also means that the treatment of those unlikely to be profitably exploited can’t be completely ignored. If retired or disabled people are treated too harshly, this can lead to unrest which has an impact on profits.

The role of the state

Understanding the importance of social reproduction to capitalists’ ability to make profits leads us to consider the role of states. At the highest level, we can think of capitalist states as having three functions:

1. Managing relations between capitalists and workers
2. Managing relations between capitalists
3. Managing relations with other states

The first function doesn’t just include the regulation of employment, industrial action and so on, but also ensuring the supply of suitable labour. Individual capitalists take some responsibility for this, through apprenticeships, staff training and so on, but competition encourages ‘free riding’, where employers poach staff trained by rivals. This creates a disincentive for individual capitalists to invest in training. Given the neoliberal ‘hollowing out’ of the state (a weakening of the second function), this has been a factor in generating skills shortages in certain occupations.

The first function also includes an ideological element, ensuring through education, social work, legislation, courts, prisons, religion etc. that ideas that facilitate capitalism dominate. Different aspects of these state functions can come into conflict with each other. We have seen this recently with the rows about immigration. Many capitalists want to hire cheap workers and pay lower taxes, so welcome migrants whose social reproduction costs them and their state less because it was carried out abroad. Better still if migrant workers can be made to fear deportation if they aren’t sufficiently compliant. But the state relies on nationalist and racist ideology to ensure the compliance of the working class. There are similar tensions between the state’s aim to reduce costs using family structures and ideology based on unpaid social reproductive work by women, the desire of capitalists to pay less than a ‘family wage’, and strategies for incorporating LGBTQ+ people into family structures or excluding them to promote conformist ideology. Family ideology also conflicts with the barriers created to family reunion through border policies.

Workers’ power

Another common misconception relates to the relationship between exploitation and workers’ power. While it’s true at a general level that workplace struggle can disrupt the flow of profits, this doesn’t help us understand our power to resist exploitation or oppression in practice. Some workers who don’t produce profits have great power. For example, if primary school teachers don’t work, half the economy grinds to a halt as parents look after their kids instead of working. Dockers are not ‘productive’ of surplus value but they are essential for capitalists to realise that surplus value by being able to sell their goods and make a profit. The factors we should consider to understand the potential power of different groups of workers are largely unrelated to whether they are exploited or not.

It’s common to counterpose ‘workplace’ issues to wider social and political ones, but this is nonsense. Almost every workplace struggle is either against oppression (e.g. management bullying) or for a higher quality of social reproduction (e.g. better pay, shorter hours). We generally fight at work against our oppression at work, and for a better quality of life outside work.

When workers go on strike it is a race between workers trying to disrupt production to force the employer to concede and employers trying to disrupt workers’ social reproduction (our ability to house and feed ourselves etc.) to force us to concede.

The phrase ‘working people’ is frequently heard from politicians these days. This is part of the demonisation of the ‘economically inactive’ and disabled people, despite many of them being in paid work. The working class is a much larger group than those currently in paid employment – including those too young, old or sick to work, those busy doing unpaid caring work, and those that employers throw on the unemployment scrapheap whenever it is more profitable to do so.

Oppression shapes how we experience work

An unusual feature of labour power as a commodity is that it is ‘embodied’ – attached to its human owner. These humans have characteristics such as gender, nationality, religion or disability apparently unrelated to their function as bearers of a commodity, which in fact shape how we experience work, how we engage with the labour market, and how we resist our oppression and exploitation. Rather than parking questions of oppression in our efforts to unite the working class against our exploiters and oppressors, we need to connect all the resistance to exploitation and oppression.

It’s a good start to aim at human liberation, but it’s not enough. Oppression shapes our lives today, including the power relationships between activists. So we have to do our imperfect best to be attentive to those power relationships and fight to counteract oppression within our movements and organisations. That’s why, for example, saying we are fighting for women’s liberation is not enough. Feminism has many meanings, but it is the term that the best elements of the movement against women’s oppression use, so we should describe ourselves as feminists too.

Marx and Engels ended the Communist Manifesto with the call ‘Proletarians of all countries, unite!’ Lenin recognised that to win his revolution he needed to unite workers, peasants, soldiers and sailors – an alliance encapsulated by the slogan ‘bread, peace and land’. He wrote of the oppressed classes and nationalities, not just about exploited people. By the 1920s, recognising the struggles of racially subjugated black communities, Lenin had updated Marx and Engels’ slogan to ‘Workers of the world and oppressed peoples, unite!’ It is sad to see people who claim to be their followers retreating to crude class reductionism, downplaying the importance of struggles against oppression, and giving ground to the ‘war on woke’.

If we want to build a society free from oppression and exploitation, we have to think about the forces necessary to defeat capitalist states, put our workplaces under democratic control and dismantle the structures that reproduce oppression. The movements that challenge capitalism and its states are not purely movements of the working class. They include movements of national liberation and against racism, sexism and other forms of oppression. Our best chance of ending capitalism and achieving human liberation is not to counterpose working class movements to those against oppression, nor to counterpose workplace and community struggles, but to try to unite them against a common enemy and for a socialist goal.