By the early 1980s, the class-centered politics of the socialist
tradition was in crisis. In this situation, leading commentators took
apocalyptic tones. By the end of the 1980s, the Left remained deeply
divided between the advocates of change (“New Times”
required new politics) and the defenders of the faith (class politics
could be practiced, mutatis mutandis, much as before). By the
mid-1990s the former had mainly carried the day. We wish to present this
contemporary transformation not as the “death of
class,” but as the passing of one particular type of
class society, one marked by the process of working-class formation
between the 1880s and 1940s and the resulting political alignment,
reaching its apogee in the social democratic construction of the postwar
settlement. As long-term changes in the economy combined with the attack
on Keynesianism in the politics of recession from the mid-1970s, the
unity of the working class ceased to be available in the old and
well-tried way, as the natural ground of left-wing politics. While one
dominant working-class collectivity went into decline (the classic male
proletarians of mining, transportation, and manufacturing industry, with
their associated forms of trade unionism and residential concentration),
another slowly and unevenly materialized to take its place
(predominantly female white-collar workers in services and all types of
public employment). But the operative unity of this new working-class
aggregation—its active agency as an organized political
presence—is still very much in formation. To reclaim the political
efficacy of the socialist tradition, some new vision of collective
political agency will be needed, one imaginatively keyed to the emerging
conditions of capitalist production and accumulation at the start of the
twenty-first century. Class needs to be reshaped, reassembled, put back
together again in political ways. To use a Gramscian adage: The old has
been dying, but the new has yet to be born. Class decomposition
is yet to be replaced by its opposite, the recomposition of class into a
new and coherently shaped form.
No início da década de 1980, a política centrada em classes da tradição socialista estava em crise, e comentadores importantes adotaram tons apocalípticos. No final da década, a esquerda permanecia profundamente dividida entre os advogados da mudança e os defensores da fé. Em meados dos anos 1990, os primeiros tinham, de modo geral, ganhado a batalha. O artigo busca apresentar essa mudança contemporânea não como a 'morte da classe', mas como o desaparecimento de um tipo particular de sociedade de classes, marcado pelo processo de formação da classe trabalhadora entre os anos 1880 e 1940 e pelo alinhamento político daí resultante, atingindo seu apogeu na construção social-democrata do acordo do pós-guerra. Quando mudanças de longo prazo na economia se combinaram com o ataque ao keynesianismo na política de recessão a partir de meados da década de 1970, a unidade da classe trabalhadora deixou de estar disponível da forma antiga e bastante utilizada, como o terreno natural da política de esquerda. Enquanto uma coletividade dominante da classe trabalhadora entrou em declínio, outra se corporificou de modo lento e desigual para tomar o lugar daquela. Mas a unidade operacional dessa nova agregação da classe trabalhadora ainda está, em grande parte, em formação. Para recuperar a eficácia política da tradição socialista, alguma nova visão de agência política coletiva será necessária, uma visão imaginativamente ajustada às condições emergentes da produção e acumulação capitalista no início do século XXI.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.