How and why do apparently “hegemonized” workers achieve such qualitative leaps into outright conflict with employers and the state? Marxist theoretical development in the wake of the distortions of Stalinism has concentrated almost entirely on the domination of such “superstructural” factors as ideology, culture, and political process and on their role in structuring consciousness and blanking out dissent. In urging a more thorough exploration of the complexities of working-class consciousness and “common sense,” our own argument sets out to challenge this widespread assumption of the uncontested hegemony of ruling ideas.
We begin by reversing the critique. Just as a crude determinism of economic structures and interests cannot be assumed in the trajectory of class consciousness, nor can an uncontested “overdetermination” of ruling-class or even reformist ideology be assumed to be a stable property of the capitalist system. Rather than positive endorsement of the ruling ideas of the epoch, a “dull compulsion” to accept the apparently inevitable may be a more accurate description of at least some strands of working-class response to the prevailing system. And if we substitute fatalistic acceptance for coherent and positive consent, it becomes possible to sight gaps—potential breaks in the apparently seamless canvas of late-twentieth-century “common sense.”
We start by citing an absence: the absence of ideology. What is being proposed here is not that workers do not subscribe to ruling-class ideas, wholly or in part, or that they do not accept, in one or another sense, the parameters of reformist ideology; the boundaries of that acceptance and the pervasiveness of reformist ideology are realities that if anything deserve much greater recognition in many segments of the left. Yet the impermanence, the instability, in many ways the fragility of this acceptance is also indicated when we probe more deeply into the precise nature of “actually existing” working-class consciousness. Here we discover, rather than coherent and explicit assent to a consistent set of ideas and “values,” a more complex mix: one characterized less by undifferentiated ideological domination than by inconsistency, contradiction, and lack of information.
The essentially incoherent nature of working-class social and political attitudes was noted in a cluster of studies produced in the 1970s that united in indicating that workers’ views on general social issues tend to exhibit a mixture of indifference and inconsistency rather than active “legitimization” of the status quo.17 The term “pragmatic acceptance” was used by Michael Mann to express the essentially fatalistic, rather than actively participatory, dimension of workers’ outlooks.18 Later, Scott Lash provided strong grounds for a dismissal of workers’ perceptions of class and similar political concepts as confused and incoherent.19 But workers’ consciousness is also contradictory—a crucial feature allowing a corresponding potential for struggle and subversion of ideology. Edwards and Scullion’s 1982 study of workplace organization shows shop stewards subjectively endorsing the profit-related ethos of their management while objectively undermining it with their own actions: “There was, as it were, an unconscious form of resistance whereby stewards’ everyday actions challenged managerial rights in many ways even though their articulated ideology involved commitment to the same aims.”20
More recent research is less directly concerned with “consciousness” but touches nevertheless on workers’ outlooks and attitudes. For example, David Croteau’s 1995 study of the apparently unbridgeable gulf between “radical” and working-class politics shows that these (primarily white) workers’ apparent dismissal of socialist ideas had little bearing on their endorsement of the prevailing ideology; in fact, as Croteau points out, the workers in his study were often considerably clearer as to the corrupt realities of present-day capitalism than were their “radical” counterparts. Rather, workers’ perceptions of society revealed a profound cynicism and fatalism, a sense that there is nothing you can do about these problems and that it is best simply to concentrate on one’s family and private concerns.21
This essentially abstentionist outlook confirms our hypothesis of an “absence” of ideology or indeed any positive, coherent conception of social structure. Nevertheless, the fragile balance between “pragmatic acceptance” and the underlying resentment indicated in the details of Croteau’s study do not augur well for any prognosis of stability in the conduct of capitalist relations. While the issue of struggle is unexplored by Croteau, who leaves his workers as fatalistic and powerless as they began, such apparent resignation stands in sharp contrast to his interviewees’ anger over issues of working time and labor intensification, issues which have propelled many similarly “nonpolitical” groups of workers into major industrial struggles in both Britain and America.22
The attempt to draw links between such material conditions and potentially subversive action has led in recent years to a revival of the old refrain about “economic determinism.” Chantal Mouffe, for example, writes: “How can it be maintained that economic agents can have interests defined at the economic level which would be represented a posteriori at the political and ideological levels? . . . That amounts to stating that interests can exist prior to the discourse in which they are formulated and articulated.”23 The problem with this kind of argument is that it in itself advocates a crudely “deterministic” relationship between different levels of operation of capitalist production relations. Workers do not take part in resistance because of, or through, a “discourse” that explicitly rejects capitalism in political and ideological terms. Such resistance or disillusionment occurs as a result of the material impact—on those who, because of their class position, have no alternative—of the contradictions operating within capitalist production.
Many of these are expressed in the collapse of the mythical 1980s “prosperity” of Thatcherism, swallowed whole by British “New Times” discourse theorists but cruelly undercut for workers by factors that were starkly, non-“hegemonicalIy” economic. A 1992 study of British workers in the same “Reagan Democrat” social stratum as those in Croteau’s research (known as “C2s” from their position in British socioeconomic census categories) sheds light on the essential instability of skilled workers’ adherence to the “hegemony” of the Thatcher years.24 Rather than the “prosperity” and individualist “consumerism” emphasized in postmodernist analysis,25 the overwhelming message that emerges from this research is one of widespread, and growing, economic insecurity. Respondents’ “perceptions” were only too well-founded on direct experience of layoffs, short-term contracts, house repossessions, and the joblessness of their teenage children. The sense of insecurity and demoralization conveyed in the words of these erstwhile working-class Tories—“We are now going backwards . . . struggling to survive”; “There’s always that fear at the back of my mind”; “It’s dire—we’ve hit the bottom and can’t go any further”—is potent testimony to the lack of permanence of apparently impregnable hegemonic structures. Disillusionment with Thatcher’s “property-owning democracy,” once acclaimed as the pinnacle of a new culture of “individual aspiration,” is compounded by the massive intensification of labor, alongside pay freezes and other pressures on living standards, experienced by those lucky enough to retain “core” employment.26
But there is another side to the coin of this bewildered demoralization—the propensity of such economic factors to propel even the ideologically conservative “C2s” into action, which challenges both capitalist production relations and the state. The relatively well-paid and secure workers who, in addition to the much-vaunted “self-employed,” made up the subjects of the 1992 study were from the same stratum as those workers involved in key antiemployer struggles during the worst years of Thatcherism. The printworkers who fought the savage anti-Murdoch struggles at Wapping would fall almost entirely into the category hailed by postmodernist writers as swallowing whole the “consumerist” bait of Thatcherism, as would Ford workers at Dagenham, who staged a significant strike in the late 1980s that revealed the vulnerability of “just-in-time” work arrangements. Many of the ambulance workers who took part in the protracted national dispute of 1989 were characteristic South-Eastern “Tory waverers.”27
While the “Reagan Democrats” and “C2s”