Whats happening to the working class

Marxist Analysis · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The central thesis is that the working class is not disappearing, shrinking, or losing its revolutionary potential, but is instead undergoing a profound structural transformation that expands its boundaries while intensifying the pressures upon it. Mick Brooks argues that the apparent decline of the industrial proletariat — the so-called "deindustrialisation" — has been misinterpreted by bourgeois sociologists and historians as evidence of the working class's obsolescence. In reality, the working class is being recomposed: manufacturing jobs are replaced by service sector employment, full-time permanent positions are replaced by part-time and temporary contracts, and layers of workers previously considered "middle class" — teachers, librarians, social workers — are being proletarianised. The article claims that far from weakening the class, these changes are creating the objective conditions for a broader, more conscious, and potentially more militant working class, provided Marxists understand the dynamics correctly and organise accordingly.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is rooted in the classical Marxist definition of class as relation to the means of production, drawn directly from the Communist Manifesto. Brooks insists that class is not determined by income level, occupation, lifestyle, or consumption patterns, but by whether one owns productive property or must sell one's labour power to live. This allows him to include public sector workers, white-collar employees, and even sections of the "professional middle class" within the working class.

The article draws on Marx's concept of the "collective worker" — the idea that under modern capitalism, production is a social process involving many different types of labour, all of which are productive in the Marxist sense. Cleaners, maintenance workers, and assembly line workers are all part of this collective labourer, even if their specific functions differ. This theoretical move allows Brooks to reject the distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" labour as a basis for excluding service sector workers from the working class.

The analysis also deploys the Marxist understanding of the reserve army of labour, particularly in its discussion of mass unemployment as a disciplinary mechanism. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is implicit in the explanation of why capital attacks labour — the post-war boom ended, profitability declined, and capital responded by intensifying exploitation, casualising employment, and tearing up workers' protections. The concept of proletarianisation — the process by which layers of the petty bourgeoisie and intermediate strata are forced into wage labour — is presented as the dominant social trend of the twentieth century.

The article situates itself within the Marxist tradition that emphasises the working class as the agent of revolutionary change, not because of its size or homogeneity, but because of its structural position within capitalism. It draws on the historical experience of the British labour movement, from the Chartist period through the New Unionism of 1889, the industrial unionism of the 1930s, and the white-collar unionisation waves of the 1960s and 1970s, to argue that the working class has repeatedly been written off only to re-emerge in new forms.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was originally published in 1996, at the height of the post-Thatcher, post-Major consolidation of neoliberal restructuring in Britain. The specific conjuncture it addresses is one of deep defeat for the organised working class: trade union membership had fallen from a peak of over 12 million in the 1970s to around 7 million; manufacturing employment had dropped from over 8 million to below 5 million; and the Tories had spent seventeen years systematically dismantling workers' legal protections.

Brooks provides precise data to anchor the analysis. Between 1979 and 1989, labour productivity in manufacturing rose by 4.7% per year, yet net investment over the same period was only one-seventh of its pre-1973 average. This is "jobless growth" — the same output wrung from fewer workers through intensified exploitation, not through technological modernisation. The proportion of the working population in full-time permanent employment fell from 56% to 36% over twenty years. Nine million workers lost their jobs between the 1992 election and the time of writing.

The article documents the specific mechanisms of the neoliberal assault: the anti-union laws, the abolition of Wages Councils, the weakening of unfair dismissal protections, the cutting of benefits to force workers into low-paid work, the proliferation of zero-hours contracts, compulsory competitive tendering, and the systematic casualisation of employment. Brooks compares Britain unfavourably with the rest of Europe on every measure of working conditions — hours worked, night work, shift work, statutory holiday entitlement — and concludes that British capitalism's strategy is to turn the country into the "sweatshop of the world."

The geopolitical dimension is also present. Brooks notes that British capitalists cannot compete with Chinese labour — "hundreds of millions prepared to work a 14 hour day for £1" — and that the only viable strategy for advanced economies is to move "upstream" into high-skill, high-technology production. But this requires a socialist plan, not market forces.

Where the Argument Continues

The article leaves several questions open. First, the relationship between trade union consciousness and revolutionary consciousness is asserted but not fully theorised. Brooks treats unionisation as a measure of class consciousness — "workers who have decided that they and their boss's interests are bound to collide are on the way to thinking that the working class and the boss class have nothing in common" — but does not explore the limits of trade union consciousness or the conditions under which it can be transcended. This is a question taken up in other IDOM articles on the role of the revolutionary party and the relationship between economic and political struggle.

Second, the article does not address the question of the labour aristocracy or the stratification of the working class in any systematic way. Brooks acknowledges that the working class is "not a homogeneous lump" and that there are "quite wide differentials in pay levels," but he does not develop a theory of how capital uses these divisions to divide the class. This connects to broader Marxist debates about the labour aristocracy and the role of the "better-off" sections of the working class in stabilising capitalism.

Third, the article's treatment of gender is limited. Brooks notes that women workers were initially dismissed by male trade unionists as working only for "pin money" and that the unionisation surge of the 1960s and 1970s was concentrated among white-collar workers where female employment is heavy. But he does not develop a Marxist-feminist analysis of how the recomposition of the working class is gendered, or how the casualisation of work disproportionately affects women.

Fourth, the article does not discuss the political implications of the changes it describes. It ends with a call for a socialist plan but does not analyse the current state of working-class political organisation, the role of the Labour Party, or the relationship between the trade unions and the labour movement. These questions are taken up in other IDOM articles and in the broader work of the Revolutionary Communist International.

Connections

The article should be read alongside Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto for the foundational definition of class, and alongside Marx's Capital Volume 1 for the concepts of the collective worker, the reserve army of labour, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England provides historical context for the British working class's development.

Within the Marxist tradition, the article connects to the work of Harry Braverman on the degradation of work and the deskilling thesis (Labor and Monopoly Capital), and to the debates within the International Socialist tradition about the nature of the working class and the role of white-collar workers. The article's insistence on the proletarianisation of the "middle class" echoes the analysis of Nicos Poulantzas, though Brooks would reject Poulantzas's tendency to exclude certain categories of workers from the working class.

The article also connects to the broader IDOM corpus on the nature of the current conjuncture, particularly articles on the crisis of British capitalism, the role of the trade unions, and the strategy of the revolutionary party. Against the Stream episodes on the state of the working class and the prospects for struggle would provide more recent updates on the trends Brooks identifies.

Key Quotes

1. "Class is therefore defined by your relation to the means of production. The capitalist class makes its living by owning. The working class makes its living by earning."

2. "Proletarianisation is the greatest social trend of the twentieth century."

3. "The definition of class was important to Marx since it was the basic clue to the dynamics of political development and made possible revolutionary struggle for a new socialist form of society. Workers were bound to become conscious of their class interests. 'It is not a question of what this or that proletarian or even the whole proletariat at any moment regards as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is and what in accordance with this being it will historically be compelled to do.'"

4. "The difference with craft workers was that they had a monopoly of their own skill. Nobody could tell them to work faster — they could control the pace of their own work. For capital, relentlessly trying to raise the rate of exploitation, that is bad news. That is why there is a tendency for capitalism to attempt to displace skills."

5. "The inevitable response of a capitalist firm or a capitalist country which has fallen behind its rivals is to blame and crack down on its own working class. It may be an inevitable response, but it's not an answer."

6. "The only way advanced countries can pay their way in the world is by going upstream, by using our accumulated skills and technology to produce things that poor countries can't. No doubt about it — British industry is in desperate need of modernisation. But only a socialist plan can accomplish it."