What makes someone working class?

Amazon workers protest outside of Amazon headquarters in central London on Monday

Class still matters in politics. That is the lesson of last week’s council elections according to Guardian newspaper commentator Larry Elliott.

Twenty-five years ago, it was a different story. Then Labour prime minister Tony Blair championed the idea of a classless Britain.

We were told that blue collar jobs in manufacturing would be replaced by white collar jobs in services. Everyone would be middle class.

This fantasy did not last long. It was crushed by spiralling inequality, rocketing child poverty, the cost-of-living crisis and the trap of low paid jobs.

Now class is back—but the return of class appears to be feeding the right, not the left.

Nigel Farage has proclaimed Reform UK the party of the working class.

The media is awash with exaggerated claims that an imagined white male working class is resentful of all things “woke” and thinks immigration is blighting society. This is a caricature of the working class that is not now and never has been true.

Class isn’t defined by where you live, your accent or even how much you earn. As Karl Marx argued, class is a social relationship.

The capitalist class owns and controls the “means of production”—the offices, the factories and the machinery.

The working class have to sell their “labour power”, their ability to work, in return for a wage to live. This means workers are exploited.

Exploitation isn’t just about being bullied by your boss or being badly treated in the workplace. Capitalists pay workers far less in wages than the amount of value their work creates. And workers have little or no control over how they work.

But it’s not just workers against bosses. They must also struggle against managers, an intermediate layer between workers and bosses who are paid to enforce discipline and pressure people to work harder and longer.

University lecturers may earn more and live different lives than the people who clean their offices. But both groups have the same interests in opposing the bosses. You are working class when you can only improve your conditions at work by fighting back collectively.

And the capitalist system itself gives workers power.

Capitalists constantly try to get ahead of their competitors by investing in new, more efficient technology.

This technology actually gives the workers who operate it enormous power. Some argue that the decline in “traditional” manufacturing means that workers have lost the capacity to fight as a class.

But manufacturing has been in decline since the First World War. And it never accounted for more than 50 percent of the workforce.

Patterns of employment are always changing. But the working class always has immense numerical and social power. The system needs health and education services so workers develop the physical and intellectual capacity for physical and skilled labour.

Teachers, lecturers and health workers have power to disrupt the system. Corporations such as Amazon employ hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

If they stopped working, they could bring the whole distribution system to a halt. And those workers are beginning to organise, as workers always have.

The core of support for the far right comes from the self-employed and small business owners who feel squeezed by both the trade unions and the large corporations.

Their reactionary ideas can leak into workplaces. When workers are passive, they feel powerless. They can be pulled by the fake solutions offered by the far right. But this is not inevitable.

In most workplaces there is a constant tension between passivity and confidence, between fighting for collective solutions and retreating into individual concerns.

Individual socialists can make a difference in those debates by supporting progressive campaigns that build confidence and collective organisation.

The anger that fuels the far right can be channelled towards fighting back against the system.