ILPC 2026

 This year’s conference theme – class and the labour process – implicitly assumes some gap or level of discontinuity with issues and traditional themes dealt with in labour process analysis (LPA). The paper outlined here evaluates how the mainstream labour process tradition has engaged with class and explores what can be done to address some of the challenges for a labour analysis and politics. We argue that LPA does have a class analysis, but one that is a ‘local’ rather than universal or expansive one.  Capital and labour are central categories, concepts and actors, but what LPA has tended to reject is what might be called ‘conveyor belt’ assumptions that posit a direct and teleological relationship between social relations at work, class formation and struggle. For example, labour process concepts and research strongly informed the extensive class debates in the 1970s debates and beyond. Within orthodox Marxism, class is defined by relations of production. Class position is always important as capital pulls new groups into waged labour positions/ industrialises new sectors, as we saw in earlier debates about the ‘new working class’ or recent debates about ‘creative class’. Yet these debates illuminated little about real labour struggles and largely faded away.  

The other ‘conveyor belt’ idea that LPA reacted against was the ‘gravedigger thesis’. Deriving from an orthodox Marxist legacy, the thesis postulates that the proletariat would be compelled to challenge and transform class society by virtue of its objective location in the system of production, becoming both the leading and universal liberating class. The working class was never a universal liberating agent, but under Fordism and earlier there was a more organic connection between informal struggles at work, collective labour action and formal labour politics. In contemporary political economy in advanced capitalist economies such organic links have been weakened, broken or fragmented. Links between labour conditions at work and in the market and labour politics in society have become far more contingent and complex. The left (in all its variants) in advanced capitalist countries has largely lost the battle to articulate and ‘represent the ‘labour interest’.

That does not mean that a radical politics of work and class is dead or out-of-date. The paper goes on to rethinking some key concepts and connections. First it deals with labour in the market, in particular by critically examining the precarity thesis. Guy  Standing rejects ownership/control definitions of class for a status divide between those with and without employment security. Precariousness is part of being worker historically, except for a brief period (50s-70s) in advanced economies, but Standing’s core thesis is under-conceptualised and over-sold. Second, we look at labour in the workplace.  Many mainstream and radical perspectives now no longer see the workplace as a central or contested terrain. For example, in recent accounts from Mason (2016) and Srnicek and Williams (2015) the working class (in both developed and developing economies) is presented as fragmented, divided and in thrall to consumption and debt, whilst the labour movement is largely defeated, demoralised and sclerotic. There is an increasing emphasis on a post-work politics whose central demand is a universal basic income. We seek to locate a space for an understanding of the capacity for self-organisation and resistance in the workplace, and the development of a more specific and distinctive ‘politics of production’ (Thompson and Smith 2017). This requires accepting and embracing greater diversity in the form and content of labour agency. Labour scholars need to make and seek practical and conceptual connections between different types and levels of struggle without losing sight of the distinctiveness and legitimacy of each.

References

Thompson, P. and Smith, C. (2017) ‘Capital and the Labour process’, in ‘Reading “Capital” Today’, I. Schmidt and C. Fanelli (ed.) London, Pluto Press, pp. 116-137.

Srnicek, N. and Williams, A. (2015) Inventing the future: Postcapitalism and a world without work. London: Verso Books.

Mason, P. (2015) PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future. London: Allen Lane.