Who Are The Middle Class?

In the years after the banking crash the slogan “we are the 99%!” was popular especially in movements like Occupy Wall Street. In those years there was a massive swing left across the globe, from the Indignados to the rise of Syriza in Greece. Those movements failed to challenge the system. If the decade following the banking crisis represented a revolution in miniature, then the years since have seen the pendulum swing to the right, a counter revolution in miniature.

The rise of the far right required analysis but for many that analysis faltered when it came to pinpointing the class basis of those movements. Without a theory of the middle class you just couldn’t do it. But as the post bailout movements declined many on the left lost their focus on class and had centred on movements organised around identity. Was there a class base to this shift too? For those of us involved in class struggle, understanding who’s working class and can be won, who’s middle class and an unstable ally or frantic foe or who’s ruling class and a clear enemy, is a vital question.

In the USA they say there’s no problem - everyone is supposed to be middle class, there’s a tiny elite and the ghetto poor. The problem is if you follow the likes of authors Dan Evans and Nicos Poulantzas and exaggerate the size of the middle class, US style, then you can justify moving to reformist politics claiming it’s more representative. On the other hand if you evade the question and declare “we are the 99%!” then everyone is a worker - but that smuggles middle class ideas into the left under the disguise of them really being working class ideas. We need clarity on class.

The US masking of class was echoed by former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar when he said that 70% of people in Ireland were middle class. The problem was he was referencing a US study. But for Varadkar and others in the ruling class, obscuring class relations is a matter of survival. There are many in the middle class who desperately want to avoid the revelation of their true class allegiance. Our job as socialists is to pull the mask off.

The Russian socialist Lenin once wrote that: “People always have been and they always will be the stupid victims of deceit and self-deception in politics, until they learn behind every kind of moral, religious, political, social phrase, declaration and promise to seek out the interests of this or that class or classes.” There’s so much confusion around the question of class. Many people think accents define class. Or your cultural tastes. But for Marxists class is defined by your position in the system of production. Lenin defined class as follows:

“Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it.”

So a class is a large group defined by: 1. How they differ from other groups defined by the role they play in a system of social production. 2. We need to look at whether they own or do not own the “means of production” (the tools, machines, factories and offices) - but also he indicates that in “most cases” this will be sanctioned by law but in others it may not. 3. The role the group plays in the social organisation of the workers, do they manage, control, discipline our class? Finally, Lenin argued that 4. As a consequence of the above points a class takes a share of the social wealth produced by the working class.

These four points help us to locate the main classes in capitalist society. It’s not as simple as saying “everyone who doesn’t own the means of production is a worker” because then you are putting anti-worker groups like the police and managers in with workers. But when you consider the whole system of production, all social relationships and the role a group plays in the “social organisation of labour” - as well as their relationship to ownership or non-ownership of the means of production - you can find there are more classes than just workers and capitalists.

The police, for example, get paid a wage, don’t own the means of production but play a role in the “social organisation of labour”. They baton striking workers like the Debenhams workers off picket lines. You need to consider class from all the above angles to really understand where a group of people is situated and the role they play under capitalism.

The working class includes all those who are economically exploited or have labour stolen from them (this distinction is important in understanding the public sector, which I’ll explain later), who do not own the means of production, take part in the collective work process for capitalism and are paid a wage. This includes “non-productive” workers and workers in public services like education or health.

Karl Marx defined a worker as “productive” for capital if they created surplus value. If you work for an 8 hour day and your pay is equivalent to 4 hours then your boss has stolen 4 hours of work from you. This is very simplified but in essence capitalism is built on this stolen labour which Marx called “surplus value”. Capitalism doesn’t care if you produce a physical object like a car or a “service” - if they can exploit you and profit from it, it’s all the same to them.

Wages are set to a level that pays the worker for their “labour power” or the capacity for work. The value of labour power, just like any commodity under capitalism, is determined by the proportion of the total social labour that it takes to create you, the worker. So the boss thinks there’s no exploitation because they paid you the full value of your labour power. But labour power has a very interesting characteristic - you can produce goods and services that have a value more than the value of your labour power.

Let’s say it takes you 4 hours at work to produce enough goods or services to reproduce your wage, the boss doesn’t ring an alarm and say “stop work!” - instead they try to keep you at your machine, desk or laptop as long as they possibly can. To be an “unproductive” worker doesn’t imply any moral judgement on Marx’s part. He’s simply looking at whether the worker in question generates surplus value for capitalism or not. A worker in a commercial company sells already produced goods. This company is just circulating commodities, not producing them, it isn’t generating surplus value but the workers in it are still having labour stolen.

I’ll explain. Bosses in unproductive sectors of the economy are drawing down from the pool of surplus value created in the productive sectors without adding to it. But their workers are still cheated out of labour by their boss. If the worker works for 8 hours they’re still being paid for just 4 hours. If the boss had to pay for the full 8 hours he’d have to hand over more of the surplus he’s taken from the productive sectors of the economy. So it’s in their interest to push for lower wages and to steal more labour from their workers.

These workers are not “exploited” in the sense of having surplus value created by them stolen, but they are having a portion of their labour left unpaid. The less their boss pays them the more he can pocket from the pool of surplus extracted elsewhere. As author Erik Olin Wright wrote: “both productive and unproductive workers are exploited; both have unpaid labour extorted from them. The only difference is that in the case of productive labour, unpaid labour-time is appropriated as surplus-value; whereas in the case of unproductive labour, unpaid labour merely reduces the costs to the capitalist of appropriating part of the surplus-value produced elsewhere.”

It’s wrong to put these workers in the middle class as Nicos Poulantzas does. And some workers perform both productive and unproductive actions in their jobs. When a Tesco worker puts food on the shelves they’re productive because transportation of the commodity to the point of sale is part of production. But when they sit at the cash register they’re a commercial worker, they’re engaged in circulation. They don’t change class by virtue of the work they do. They’re workers. But so are public sector employees like nurses and teachers.

Author Dan Evans in his book “A Nation Of Shopkeepers” places public sector workers, white collar workers, call centre workers and security workers in the middle class. This is a mistake. Public sector workers don’t make commodities but instead satisfy a social need. Capitalism needs healthy workers and a certain level of education in the labour force. In this sector there is also unpaid labour despite these workers not producing surplus value. The state hires a nurse for a 10 hour shift and pays her a wage equivalent to far less hours of labour. The state is a parasite on surplus value produced elsewhere in the economy but just like with “non-productive” commercial workers the state makes a saving by paying the worker less than the actual labour done.

These workers are having labour stolen by the collective capitalist we call the state. As James Connolly wrote: “Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.” This “committee of the rich” saves by paying these workers less. The capitalist state owns the “means of production” in the state sectors and just like other capitalists uses this ownership to extract unpaid labour, but not in the form of surplus value. The worker in a private company, a commercial company or working in public services has labour stolen. They’re members of our class. But we have to be careful here to distinguish between the state as a provider of public services and the capitalist state as a machine for holding our class down.

The state bureaucracy for example is described by Karl Marx as being populated by the bourgeoisie: “a means of adding to the direct economic exploitation a second exploitation of the people, by assuring their families all the rich places in the state household”. He describes the state bureaucracy and the armed bodies of men who ultimately defend state power as an “executive power with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its vast and ingenious state machinery, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half a million, this appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society and chokes all its pores.”

But what about the middle class? There are two sections to the middle class. There’s what Marxists call the “petty bourgeoisie” but also what Guglielmo Carchedi calls the “new middle class”. I’ll call these two sections of the middle class the “traditional petty bourgeoisie” and the “new petty bourgeoisie”. The traditional petty bourgeoisie are a class of people that own their own “means of production” - like peasants, small farmers, craftspeople, artists and shopkeepers. They produce a commodity for sale and sell it themselves. They are half capitalist, half worker.

Examples of the traditional petty bourgeoisie: First of all, the peasantry. A peasant owns his own plot of land or plough (means of production) but also works using those means. The modern highstreet though is full of petty bourgeois - the shopkeeper who runs a shop but also works in it. They’re half capitalist, half worker. The musician who sells his own CDs is petty bourgeois, directly producing a commodity for sale and distributing it themselves. Artisans who produce commodities themselves are petty bourgeois. Self employed professionals, like lawyers, who hire themselves out from their own offices are petty bourgeois.

But also some people considered culturally working class are members of the petty bourgeoisie - the lad who owns a horse and cart and rents himself directly to tourists is petty bourgeois. The woman who sells her fitness classes to customers is also petty bourgeois, no matter what accent she might have. You can see that the petty bourgeois class forms a human “web” that penetrates the working class from above and from below. Many families in the working class estates will have members belonging to the working class and to the petty bourgeoisie, they’ll have the same accents but their class interests aren’t fully aligned.

In my family growing up in Fatima Mansions my grandparents were retired workers, my father was a rank and file soldier (a worker) and I’d another uncle who bought and sold videos and other goods. The family table mostly had workers sitting at it but the same family also had those who were living a petty bourgeois life. Some members of this class can be poorer than workers. Sometimes people are so broken by poverty, or personal trauma, that they fall out of a class groove.

What Marx called the “lumpenproletariat” was the “passive decaying matter of the lowest layers of the old society”, “a disintegrating mass thrown hither and yonder”. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia described this layer as “declassed strata recruited from various classes”. But the most damaged and traumatised people, thrown out of their class groove and into homelessness and crime often return to a class location. Marx included sex workers in this category but those who work for themselves are best categorised as petty bourgeois. Most criminals who buy and sell drugs are small capitalists. Studies of the prison population in Ireland show that most inmates have worked for 50% of the time since they left school and that their life was defined by uncertainty rather than just unemployment and poverty.

The advance of technology see workers necessarily thrown out of work and replaced by machines, this and the boom bust cycles of the system leads to the creation of what Marx called the “Industrial Reserve Army” - that is a section of the workers thrown out of work and into poverty, who are used as a pressure on those still working in order to drive down wages. This group of people are unemployed workers. Although people who are long term unemployed can be recruited to the criminal petty bourgeoisie or will attempt to set themselves up as self employed, entering the traditional petty bourgeoisie that way.

The system has also pursued a strategy of developing the petty bourgeoisie as a support base. Construction workers are forced into bogus self employment and can end up setting themselves up as individual contractors or hiring labour for particular jobs. They then enter the petty bourgeoisie. In fact a whole layer of petty bourgeois people, gym owners, nail bar managers, who might even regard themselves as working class, were ruined by the covid pandemic and were opened up to the arguments of the far right. Class helps to see the underlying dynamics of what’s going on.

Some people with middle class accents are actually workers, some people with working class accents are actually petty bourgeois. This matters because the economic circumstances of the petty bourgeoisie conditions behaviours that can damage the working class left when members of that class join the left. How does the class position of the traditional petty bourgeoisie shape its politics? The petty bourgeoisie is like Shakespeare’s Hamlet - full of self doubt, tailing one of the main classes and then the other. Lenin wrote that:

“Bolshevism took shape, developed and became steeled in the long years of struggle against petty-bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism… in all essential matters, does not measure up to the conditions and requirements of a consistently proletarian class struggle. Marxist theory has established… that the petty proprietor, the small master… who, under capitalism, always suffers oppression and very frequently a most acute and rapid deterioration in his conditions of life, and even ruin, easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organisation, discipline and steadfastness. A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another—all this is common knowledge.”

The ruin of the petty bourgeoisie can see them enter the left as a source of disorganisation or enter the far right when they’re disappointed with the left. This shows why the often repeated argument that we should soften our politics to appeal to the middle class is nonsense. That class, while being the class basis of soft left, reformist politics also produces two insurrectionary responses to capitalist crises - anarchism and fascism.

You have to understand there’s a dialectic (a contradition) of identity and difference. In terms of identity; the moralistic left wing petty bourgeois and the far right are both rooted in the same class. They both display the traits of that class - they employ moral panic to capture focus and win people to mobilise, they are frenetic, they tail other social forces. But while there are moments of identity there are also very real differences. The petty bourgeois left fights oppression while the fascists want to encourage it, the petty bourgeois left support workers’ unions, the fascists want to destroy them. The petty bourgeois left is an unstable ally, the fascists are workers’ enemy.

Madeleine Johansson in her book “Class War Not Culture War” explains it like this: “One section (of the petty bourgeoisie) ties the shoelaces of the working class movement, while the other wants to burn us in ovens.” The petty bourgeois individual might join the left with the best intentions but if capitalism was actually abolished their class would be abolished too. There’s always going to be a deep rooted and unconscious desire to sabotage the workers. They won’t even know they are doing it and will deny it if confronted. Whenever a defence of working class revolutionary politics leads to an emotional response from sections of the left you can guarantee unconscious class instinct is at play.

But what about the new petty bourgeoisie?

Italian Marxist Guglielmo Carchedi wrote that the worker under modern capitalism could only be considered as a collective worker. Modern factories or office jobs see workers create only one part of a product or service, only the collective worker is responsible for the final product. He opposes this to the “ function of the global capitalist” - by this he referred to the process whereby the capitalists have withdrawn from overseeing production personally and the job of surveillance and control over workers is delegated to a whole army of managers, technicians or state bureaucrats.

The new petty bourgeoisie perform some tasks that make them part of the collective worker and some that make them part of the global capitalist. Some coordination of the labour process is technically necessary and this work is part of the necessary work of the collective worker. They are also delegated the capitalists’ “control and surveillance” of the workforce. This is a function of capital. They whip the workers into greater performance of tasks, they increase the pressure. When they do this they are capital personified.

Just like the traditional petty bourgeoisie they are both main classes at once and opposed to both main classes at once. The new petty bourgeoisie may not legally own the means of production but they have “operational control” on a day to day basis. The capitalists maintain “strategic control” - they still decide what to produce but the new petty bourgeoisie translate that into work directives for the workers. This gives them a position directly comparable to the traditional petty bourgeoisie.

They translate capitalist directives into concrete production and they discipline labour for the capitalists. This delegated authority over the means of production means they are assisting in the exploitation of workers. Corporations have whole teams of HR professionals who engage in hiring and firing and labour regulation for the capitalists. There is a whole hierarchy of managers and supervisors. This is really apparent in the public services like the health service where in order to oversee neoliberal outsourcing an army of paper pushers is hired to oversee funneling public funds into private hands while increasing pressure on the actual workers.

So the white collar salaried employees of corporations fall into three class categories; the upper managers are nothing but salaried members of the capitalist class, then there is the hierarchy of new petty bourgeoisie and finally the majority are workers. John and Barbara Ehrenriech came up with an alternative theory for the new middle class - they coined the term “Professional Managerial Class” (PMC) in the 1970s. They explained how changes in capitalism as it entered the imperialist phase - where giant globe spanning corporations came into being and began to decisively turn state policy towards war - saw a transformation of class relations and the development of a new middle class. This process began between 1890 and the 1920s.

The strength of their analysis was the focus on distinguishing between the old and new middle class. But their theory conflated managers and professional employees. They included in this PMC class some (like top managers) who belonged in the capitalist class and others (like some white collar workers) who belonged in the working class. They also defined class in terms of the “reproduction of capitalist culture” which is problematic. The capitalists are mostly shareholders in these days of monopoly capitalism. They play golf and farm out the actual running of their companies to an army of managers. The top managers have effective control over the means of production and are rewarded with stock options. This places them in the capitalist class. They are salaried members of the capitalist class.

Author Nicos Poulantzas decided to include white collar workers in the middle class because they helped to “reproduce capitalist relations”. He regarded non-productive workers as middle class too. By making everybody middle class he could justify his reformist politics and argue that the left should just enter government under capitalism. He ended up claiming that workers in the USA were the minority!

Erik Olin Wright came up with the idea of “contradictory class locations” to describe the new middle class and those who were in the space between the middle class and the other classes. He also placed the old petty bourgeoisie “outside” of the capitalist mode of production. This makes no sense because Marx described that class as half worker, half capitalist - that is in terms of the current system of production. Every type of production under capitalism is subordinated to capital. We have to understand the role it plays in the current totality despite the fact that it may have a history that reaches back to previous modes of production.

Wright puts college lecturers in a “contradictory class location” between the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. While many lecturers are just glorified teachers there are others who while they sell their labour are not subject to surveillance and control, are free to teach how they decide and have much shorter hours. The highest paid lecturers are being paid more surplus than they could possibly create. He calls these workers “semi-autonomous employees”. As British socialist Alex Callinicos wrote in his 1983 article on the new middle class: “The extent to which those in contradictory class locations derive their position from the discretion conceded to them by capital is reflected in the large gap between their earnings and those of routine white collar and manual workers.”

There is a gradation in the new petty bourgeois. It’s clear that the borders of the new petty bourgeoisie shade into the capitalist class at the top and the working class at the bottom. Those in contradictory class locations between the three main classes are going to be pulled by the classes they border. Workers’ struggle is necessary to “discipline” these sectors and pull them in behind the working class.

The new petty bourgeois hierarchy offers a ladder to climb, which in turn can offer an incentive to imitate those above. A worker who may be one grade below entering a managerial job will start to act in a way that makes entry into the new petty bourgeoisie more likely. On the other hand if those expectations aren’t met, because of downsizing, they can react and shift left.

At the top levels of the new petty bourgeoisie they have very low levels of surplus labour if any is taken from them while they take a very high level from workers. Meanwhile the lower ends of the new petty bourgeoisie give a lot of surplus labour and take very low levels from others. They participate in the proceeds of exploitation in a way that gives them an incentive to push workers harder. But the lower levels of the new petty bourgeois rung can resent being pushed by the hierarchy above them. They are pulled in two directions at once.

Just like the traditional petty bourgeois they are a social contradiction. They play the role of collective worker and global capitalist at the same time, or as Carchedi put it in a “variable balance”. This means that their behaviour is similar to that of the traditional petty bourgeoisie. Although participation in the hierarchies of management is a more collective mode of work than the individual production of the traditional petty bourgeoisie, the competition for jobs encourages a cutthroat culture. Some writers have noted that identity politics can be useful for this layer as they can use any leverage possible to get one over on a rival, for example demanding positive discrimination as a woman.

Ivor Crewe of the Essex University British Election Study, in a study on the class composition of the British Labour Party in the 1980s commented: “It is fairly clear that the growth of the Labour middle class has occurred not amongst the (traditional) petit bourgeoisie, clerical workers, or traditional occupations, but amongst the ‘new’ middle classes in other words, those who are (1) professionally qualified, and usually graduates, (2) employees rather than self-employed, (3) employed in large bureaucratic organisations, especially in the public sector, for example local and central government, nationalised industries, quangos, universities, hospitals etcetera, (4) slightly younger than average, (5) the children of skilled working-class and lower middle-class parents, in other words, those who have entered the middle class through the higher education system rather than through the possession of capital and ‘contacts’.”

The Ehrenreichs’ used the phrase ‘anti-working-class radicalism’ to explain how their “Professional Managerial Class” used moralism to lecture the workers below them. At work the new petty bourgeoisie tell workers what to do, outside of work when they enter left wing activism this class like to lecture workers from an “educated” position of moral authority. The culture war suits this layer because once you start talking about class and the need to put workers to the fore they fear their mask being pulled off. The social composition of the Labour left, for example, helps to explain its detachment from poorer working class life.

There are other middle classes under capitalism. As I wrote on the union bureaucracy in “Class War Trade Unionism”: “The union leaders have been integrated into the structures of the state and act as agents of the ruling class in the working class movement. They are not workers. They’re a separate caste, a bureaucracy that vacillates between bosses and workers. They are not on “our” side even when they are forced to fight. They vacillate all the time. They hesitate. They are two faced. Why? Because they can’t just betray workers. Sure, why would any worker bother with unions then? Members would just walk.”

They aren’t technically petty bourgeois but they act like they are because of their role mediating between capital and labour. Every union plays this role and there is no such thing as a revolutionary union. All unions exist to bargain for better conditions for us wage slaves under capitalism, but they don’t fight to end wage slavery. The abolition of the capitalist system would mean the eventual abolition of those who mediate between capital and labour. Therefore the union leaders play a petty bourgeois role organising and disorganising our class simultaneously. Obviously we have to be in all the unions, building a grassroots counter weight to the bureaucracy so that we can push for struggle and win workers to an organization, a party that doesn’t compromise with the system.

What about students? They are not a homogenous class but should be seen as a mixed grouping of young people who have come from very different class backgrounds and are on their way to different class locations. That’s why it’s very difficult to build a stable organization based on students. But student life is filled with stress and uncertainty. They can react with explosive speed to social crises but can fall back into apathy just as fast. Basing the left on students can only lead to disorganisation and a frenetic rise and fall of enthusiasm. We need to recruit students on the condition that workers are in the lead and exercise decisive ideological influence over the left.

A study in Ireland by the Irish League of Credit Unions showed that 68% of students worked while in college. The Higher Education Authority looked at 94% of all enrolments and showed the Trinity College had the highest level of rich students (36%) while only 5% of students at TCD and UCD came from disadvantaged backgrounds. The French sociologist Daniel Bertaux wrote how students have “class trajectories” - meaning their class origin and their intended destination can play a role in what class they identify with. Students can be won to left wing politics but they can also play a role in building the far right as was the case with the Chilean “Fatherland and Freedom” movement.

The focus on who is or isn’t working class doesn’t mean we think that economic class translates automatically into class consciousness. There are different levels of economic influence over class behaviour and you have to fight to develop workers. The ruling class are tightly conditioned by their role in production. No matter what various wings of that class say, authoritarians or liberals, profit is their God. Everything they say must be examined in that light. The petty bourgeoisie will shift left and right depending on the wider class struggle. They can be unreliable allies but we do want to turn them against the system while keeping our eyes open as to their class nature.

Workers have different levels of confidence, combativity and class consciousness. Marxism is the ideology of the advanced workers - but they have to be won to that ideology. As Karl Marx once wrote: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.”

That section of the working class that understands the nature of the system has to fight to liberate the rest of the class from capitalist influence. The petty bourgeois acts as a human web that transmits ruling class ideas into the heart of the working class, at our kitchen tables, in the pub, at work. This is why we need our own party, a party of what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals” of the working class, professional persuaders who are part of the working class, organically rooted and encourage people to fight while constantly challenging capitalist ideology.

Guglielmo Carchedi places groups of workers into the petty bourgeoisie when their class consciousness or culture is petty bourgeois. This is wrong but he is onto something - class consciousness matters. But instead of labelling these workers “petty bourgeois” it would be better to say “workers with a petty bourgeois consciousness” because otherwise we lose the specific power of Lenin’s definition of class.

But I strongly agree with Carchedi when he says that: “there are various levels of class consciousness, and the working class should be subdivided in separate parts according to the degree of their class consciousness… it is impossible for the working class to achieve a developed class consciousness without an organisation that wages an economic, political, and ideological fight against the class enemy under the leadership of a vanguard.”

We have to focus on those sections of the working class most ready to fight and most open to socialist ideas. There are advanced and there are backward workers. In Ireland the traditional working class estates have a culture that contains many elements of class consciousness - the sense of community, the instinctive distrust of authority and an ingrained anti-imperialism. When we Reds say the left should focus on workplaces and on these communities we don’t discount that there are other sections of the working class, we simply understand that there are more or less fruitful avenues of work. Every strike by any group of workers should be top of the list for the left.

Karl Marx wrote in 1850 that: “while the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach to the proletariat general unity and reconciliation; they extend the hand of friendship, and seek to found a great opposition party which will embrace all shades of democratic opinion; that is, they seek to ensnare the workers in a party organization in which general social-democratic phrases prevail while their particular interests are kept hidden behind, and in which, for the sake of preserving the peace, the specific demands of the proletariat may not be presented. Such a unity would be to their advantage alone and to the complete disadvantage of the proletariat.”

When workers organise politically we must organise separately to the petty bourgeoisie. We can join them in social movements against the system but we always fight for the “hegemony of the working class”. Hegemony means leadership or dominance. Only the leadership of the advanced workers, won to Marxist politics, can actually build effective social movements and a party that truly represents workers.

Marxist define a party according to its programme, or lack of one, according to the personnel who lead it and the strategies and tactics they pursue. This is how Lenin could define the Labour Party as a “bourgeois party” despite it having a working class membership. Its policies, methods and action served that class. You could say that Sinn Féin are a petty bourgeois party because, despite having many working class activists and supporters, they represent a petty bourgeois utopian ideal of reconciling bosses and workers in a 32 country capitalist Ireland.

When the First World War broke out the leaders of the Social Democratic parties of Europe were predominantly petty bourgeois. The crisis caused a realignment of the left as these leaders supported their own ruling class and betrayed the workers. This led to mass confusion and demoralisation as the workers’ leaders defected to another class. The workers couldn’t just summon up a new leadership in a short period of time. Leaders take time to develop. But this didn’t happen in Russian because Lenin had spent 20 years pulling the mask off the petty bourgeois left. This work meant the process of demoralization was shortened and the workers removed more quickly than anywhere else. The revolution depended on this clarity.

We need a working class socialist organisation, that merges with the advanced workers but also programmatically represents the ideology of the advanced workers, that is Marxism. That’s what the Red Network wants. We will work alongside the petty bourgeois left when they fight for the working class, but we will pull their mask off when they disorganize and discourage our class. This work needs to be done long before any future social crisis.