What’s unique about the working class?

The working class acts—PCS union workers on strike (Photo: Guy Smallman)

Why are socialists always banging on about the working class? After all, the biggest movements for change in recent years have been on the streets, not in the workplaces.

It is not because workers face all sorts of indignities and material deprivation. Lots of groups suffer injustices, whether it’s workers in the informal economy of the Global South or disabled people shut out of services.

The working class is not always more open to socialist ideas—it is just as vulnerable to reactionary ideas as other groups. Many working class people are forced to compete for jobs, for housing, for school places. Capitalism divides us from each other, but it also unites us.

The working class is unique in its potential power to break the bosses and in its capacity to organise collectively.

Karl Marx argued that it was a class “with radical chains”. The chains that bind workers to capitalism are the chains that make them capable of radically transforming society. 

Workers are central to the process of producing goods and services. The bosses need workers to exploit workers in order to create profits. And they draw workers together into ever bigger superstores, warehouses and transport hubs.

Workers share the same conditions and have the same interests in organising together to improve their lives. Such struggles can be defensive, aiming to stop increased hours, reduced sick pay and below inflation pay rises.

When workers are more confident, struggles can become offensive and demand better pay, better pensions, better maternity leave.

As the US socialist Hal Draper put it, “To engage in class struggle it is not necessary to ‘believe in’ the class struggle any more than it is necessary to believe in Newton to fall from an air plane. There is no evidence that workers like to struggle any more than anyone else.

“The evidence is that capitalism compels and accustoms them to do so.”

Workers’ most effective collective action is to go on strike. Strikes have an immediate impact on the creation of profits and the functioning of society.

Workers in the public sector, like teachers, doctors and nurses, also have enormous power to organise and win their demands.

Capitalism can only exist if bosses successfully exploit workers’ labour. So if workers refuse to work, they can bring the entire system to a halt. This is collective power that marks them out from other classes.

During strike movements, the hold of ruling class ideas begins to break down. Workers experience how the media, the police and the courts line up against them.

Once one set of lies begin to crumble, the entire ideological edifice of capitalism can be called into question. The experience of organising collectively creates the potential to overcome divisions within the working class.

Solidarity begins to fit workers’ lived experience and reactionary ideas no longer make sense.

Working class people are not just allies to oppressed groups. They have a material interest in challenging the racism, sexism and homophobia that divides and weakens their struggle.

Working class unity is based on the objective interests of the whole working class. This ability to crash the entire system by refusing to work gives workers a kind of leverage that no other group has.

Workers begin to change not only their conditions but also themselves. The alienation and pettiness that can dominate life is replaced by an impetus towards solidarity and a belief in our capacity to shape the world.

This means that workers can do more than stop capitalism. They can build a classless world that is free from exploitation altogether.

In abolishing its own exploitation and oppression, the working class must also abolish every rotten aspect of society that is indissolubly bound up in that central axis of exploitation.

The working class is the only class that in liberating itself has the potential to liberate all of humanity.