Class Matters: Inequality and Exploitation in 21st-Century Britain

by Charles Umney

Despite many changes to society, education, and the labor market, social class remains a fundamental force in British life in the twenty-first century. Yet we have lacked any compelling Marxist analysis of class in Britain today—until now. Charles Umney here moves Marx from the mills and mines that drove his analysis in his era into our own, with its call centers, office blocks, and fast food chains. Showing how Marxist concepts remain powerfully explanatory, Umney argues that understanding them is vital to fights against pay inequality, decreasing job security, and managerial control of the labor process. Class, Umney shows, must be understood as a dynamic and exploitative process integral to capitalism, rather than as a simple descriptive category, if we are going to better understand why capital continues to gain at the expense of labor.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology

240 pages, Paperback

Published May 20, 2018

Reviews

[Aine · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid introductory text, easy to read.

Umney starts out by giving out about people going on about inequality. It’s not that he’s a fan of inequality; it’s just that Umney doesn’t see inequality as a particularly useful political term: “inequality is a woolly and abstract term, and has been employed in ways that do not resonate widely. Admittedly, identifying inequality as the main social enemy has been effective in some was, since any politicians from right or left generally now needs to at least pretend to care about it. However, it has produced a fairly limited political discussion, with a fixation on technocratic measures like tinkering around with tax rates.”

This is what leads the book to looking at class not as a classification or category but as a relationship between two groups.

Later, he moves on to ideas around Marxism and equality..When it comes to migration, Umney argues that while people can argue x or y about the impact of migration on “native” British wages, it’s really just divide and conquer: “Research shows that even where the migrant effect on wages was at its most negative (-2 per cent in low-skilled service work), this pales in comparison to the -8 per cent impact of the financial crisis across the economy as a whole. In this sense, migrants become a personalized scapegoat (based on evidence which is always assumed rather than actually provided) for much more impersonal class imperatives.”

Umney does fall into the common trap of saying “British” but only really speaking about England. There is little discussion of the politics or Labour struggles of Wales or Scotland (never mind Northern Ireland).

With that in mind, there’s still some good lines:

“The answer to this problem is to observe that community is built through struggle. Standing on picket lines together during a strike is the best way to make people feel like they have something in common. Obviously, this is a kind of community that specifically excludes capitalists, but then the whole point of Chapter 1 was to criticise the idea of a harmonious social whole where ‘the economy works for everyone. A good society, ultimately, has to exclude capital. And so, rather than restrictions on freedom of movement, rather than family values, or whatever else, class struggle is the true source of social cohesion.”